Tetín Synagogue

RESUMEN

La historia de Tetín Synagogue

Tetín lies a quarter of an hour from Beroun and about five kilometres north-west of Liteň in Central Bohemia, and is regarded as one of the oldest Czech townships. According to the Beroun chapter of Hugo Gold's 1934 compendium of Bohemian Jewish communities, Jews had lived in Tetín since early times and maintained a full community with a synagogue, a ritual bath, a cemetery and a community house in which a German-language religious school was held for many years. The same chapter calls the Tetín synagogue the oldest in the Beroun area. The community was given up in 1872; by then Beroun had had its own synagogue since 1852. The squire and Member of Parliament Jan Vojáček then bought both the community house and the synagogue. The synagogue's furnishings were taken to the synagogue in Beroun, and Vojáček did not allow the empty building to be put to worldly use. In 1934 it was still listed among the empty synagogues of the district. Jiří Fiedler's inventory of Jewish monuments records it as a synagogue of unknown age that was demolished after 1973. Neither source says who pulled it down or why.

UBICACIÓN

Where it stood

Historic: Tetín, Beroun district, Bohemia; street and house number unknown. Today: unknown; placeholder pin at the centre of the municipality of Tetín, 266 01, okres Beroun, Středočeský kraj (approximate).

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La comunidad judía

Very little is recorded about the Jews of Tetín. Gold's 1934 compendium says only that Jews had lived in the village from ancient times and that they formed a complete community with all its institutions: a synagogue, a ritual bath, a cemetery and a community house, which for a long time also housed a German religious school. No founding date, population figures, family names, rabbis or teachers for Tetín are given in the sources read. The village belonged to a cluster of small Jewish settlements around Beroun and Liteň; Fiedler notes that Liteň, five kilometres to the south-east, had about 23 Jewish families in 1793 and its own synagogue with a rabbi. By the later nineteenth century Jewish life in the area was concentrating in Beroun, where permission for a synagogue was granted in 1852. In 1872 the Tetín community was abandoned. In Gold's 1934 survey Tetín appears among the places in the Beroun district where Jews made up less than one per cent of the population.

Arquitectura y diseño

No description, plan or photograph of the Tetín synagogue was found. Fiedler describes it only as a synagogue of unknown age, so the date of construction, the builder, the size of the prayer hall and the style are all unknown. Gold's account treats the synagogue and the community house as two distinct buildings that were bought together in 1872, which indicates that the synagogue was a building of its own rather than a prayer room inside a dwelling, though the sources do not describe it further. Its description as the oldest synagogue of the Beroun area suggests a building older than the Beroun prayer hall of 1852 and perhaps older than the nineteenth-century synagogue of Liteň, but no date is given for it. The exact plot is not recorded in the sources consulted, and no surviving fragment is known. Any reconstruction of its appearance would require the stable cadastre maps of the nineteenth century or photographs held in local or regional archives.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

Nothing is recorded about services in the Tetín synagogue beyond the bare fact that it served a community equipped with a ritual bath, a cemetery and a religious school. The religious school in the community house taught in German. No rabbi, cantor, teacher or warden of Tetín is named in the sources read, and no records of the congregation's members, customs or events were found. After the community was dissolved in 1872, the ritual objects and furnishings of the synagogue were transferred to the synagogue in Beroun, where the regional congregation continued to worship until 1941. The building itself then stood unused. Its new owner, Jan Vojáček, refused to allow it to be turned to secular purposes, and he let a poor Jewish widow, whom he supported for the rest of her life, live in part of the former community house until she died.

Destrucción

The sources describe a slow end rather than a violent one. After the community was dissolved in 1872, the synagogue was sold together with the community house to Jan Vojáček, who kept it empty and out of secular use. Gold's compendium still lists it among the district's empty synagogues in 1934. No source read records damage to it during the Nazi occupation of 1939 to 1945. Jiří Fiedler's inventory of Jewish monuments in Bohemia and Moravia records only that this synagogue of unknown age was demolished after 1973. The building therefore stood for at least a century after it lost its congregation and survived well into the post-war era. Who owned it at the time of demolition, who ordered or carried out the work, and the exact year are not recorded in the sources consulted.

El destino de la comunidad

The Jewish community of Tetín had ceased to exist in 1872, long before the Holocaust and Beroun became the centre of Jewish life in the area. The Tetín synagogue's furnishings went to the Beroun congregation, which also absorbed the community of Liteň after 1922. According to the Jewish Community of Prague's monuments register, the Beroun synagogue served the community until 1941, and the congregation came to an end as a result of the Nazi German occupation. The fate of individual Jews from Tetín, or of families descended from the Tetín community, during the deportations from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia has not been traced in the sources read. Gold's 1934 survey indicates that only a very small number of Jews, under one per cent of the population, still lived in the village at that time. No Jewish community was re-established in Tetín after 1945.

El lugar hoy

The exact site of the synagogue in Tetín is not identified in any source consulted, so it cannot be said what stands on the plot today. No visible remains, inscription or marker are recorded. Tetín's Jewish cemetery and ritual bath are mentioned in 1934 but are not listed in the Jewish Community of Prague's register of Jewish monuments, which has no entry for the village. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of the municipality and does not mark the synagogue's location. Locating the building will require the nineteenth-century stable cadastre maps of Tetín or records such as the village chronicle, which would probably be found in the State District Archive in Beroun.

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