Sephardic Synagogue of Timișoara (Cetate)

Die jüdische Gemeinde

Jews are recorded in Timișoara from the seventeenth century, when the city was under Ottoman rule. The Jewish Encyclopedia states that numerous Spanish Jews settled there between 1552 and 1716 and were well received by the Turkish authorities, and it names Moses Lopez Pereira, known as Diego d'Aguilar, as the founder of the Sephardic community; Maria Theresa later allowed five more Spanish Jewish families to settle. Ashkenazi Jews began arriving in the 1720s. A census of 1739 counted 46 Jewish families: 31 Ashkenazi families with 139 people and 15 Sephardic families with 81 people. The same encyclopaedia names Jacob Moses of Belgrade as Sephardic rabbi in 1739. Over the following century and a half the Ashkenazim grew far faster: the Jewish population reached about 1,200 in 1840, 2,202 in 1858, 4,870 in 1890 and 5,788 in 1901, while the Sephardim became a small minority. By the beginning of the twentieth century the Jewish Encyclopedia described the Spanish Jews of Temesvár as few in number.

Architektur und Gestaltung

Very little is known about the building itself. According to a study of the Cetate Synagogue by Zsuzsanna Eke, citing the architectural historian Kiss, the Jewish community chose the builder Christian Attinger to erect the Judenhof in about 1760 to 1762. The ensemble occupied part of the block bounded by Mărășești, Gheorghe Lazăr and Ungureanu streets and contained two synagogues, two rabbis' residences, a kosher slaughterhouse, a bath and a school. The local synagogue history site describes the two prayer houses, one Ashkenazi and one Sephardic, as small. No plan, photograph or drawing of the Sephardic synagogue was found, so its size, style, roof, windows and seating are unknown. Its interior furnishings are known only through one object: a richly embroidered velvet and silk curtain for the Torah ark, with a crown held by two lions at the top, columns at the sides and a Hebrew dedicatory inscription naming the donors Iosef, son of Rabbi Naftali Halevi, and his wife Golda, dated 5 Iyar 1729, which is older than the building.

Leben in der Synagoge

The synagogue was the prayer house of the Spanish-rite congregation, which kept its own rabbis and customs beside the Ashkenazi majority. Both congregations lived and worshipped in the same courtyard complex, with the rabbis' residences, the slaughterhouse, the ritual bath and the school all within the Judenhof, so that much of the community's religious life before the mid-nineteenth century was concentrated in this one corner of the inner town. The Ashkenazi prayer room became too small for its congregation, which moved in 1865 to the new Cetate Synagogue; the Torah scrolls were carried there in procession from the old temple in the Judenhof. The Sephardim remained in the Judenhof. Within it they used the embroidered ark curtain of 1729, which the Timișoara Jewish museum describes as having passed through several Sephardic prayer places, including the Judenhof, before it was moved to Fabric. Rabbi Jakab Singer mentioned this curtain in his study of the city's synagogues. The names of the Sephardic congregation's rabbis and officers in the decades before 1905 were not found.

Zerstörung

The synagogue was not destroyed by war or persecution. According to the Timișoara Jewish community's virtual museum, which is followed by the English Wikipedia article on the Fabric Sephardic Synagogue, the Sephardic synagogue in Cetate was demolished in 1905 to make room for the construction of the community headquarters. The demolition was therefore carried out by or for the Jewish community itself, which needed offices next to the great Cetate Synagogue, and the small congregation of Spanish-rite worshippers moved to the Sephardic synagogue in the Fabric district. The furniture and some ritual objects, among them the 1729 ark curtain, were saved and kept first in a prayer house in Fabric. No document of the demolition itself, the name of the contractor or the exact month was found. One source complicates the picture: the Jewish Encyclopedia, published in 1906, says that the Judenhof was demolished to make room for a new Reform synagogue and that a small Sephardic synagogue still stood in the citadel, which probably reflects information gathered before 1905.

Das Schicksal der Gemeinde

After 1905 the Sephardic rite in Timișoara survived in the Fabric Sephardic synagogue, which functioned until the 1950s and was later transformed into an Adventist church. The fate of the city's Jews during the Second World War is not covered by the sources read for this entry. The European Jewish Heritage Guide attributes the community's decline to anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and mass emigration, which reduced it from about 13,000 people in 1947 to a few dozen today; a US government report gives 725 Jews in Timișoara in 2002. Rabbi Ernő Neumann maintained religious life in the city after the war until his death in 2004. Of the six synagogues built in the city after 1867, three survive. The community's headquarters still stand at Mărășești Street 10, beside the restored Cetate Synagogue.

Der Ort heute

The site of the Sephardic synagogue is occupied by the headquarters of the Jewish Community of Timișoara at Mărășești Street 10, in the Cetate district, next to the Cetate Synagogue at number 6. In the courtyard of the headquarters is a small prayer hall called Or Hadaș (New Light), whose ark is now covered by the restored 1729 curtain that once hung in the Judenhof. A US government survey of 2010 listed a 'Spanish Temple' at Mărășești Street 10, dated to the late eighteenth century and described as ruined; no other source found describes a surviving eighteenth-century structure there, and it is unclear whether the entry refers to remains of the old building or to the later courtyard hall.

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