Old Synagogue of Tokaj

The Jewish community

Pinkas Hakehillot Hungary records that the Jews who settled in Tokaj in the first half of the eighteenth century came from Poland and made their living from leasing vineyards and trading wine. The register counts two families in 1723-24, 29 individuals in 1746, four families in 1771 and 21 Jews in 1811; Gruber gives about 100 Jews in the 1820s. Their position in the wine trade was attacked by law: in 1798 Jews were forbidden to produce high-quality wine, kosher wine included, and in 1800 to lease or buy vineyards around Tokaj, though they could still hold poorer vineyards elsewhere in Zemplén. The municipality and some landowners nevertheless supported the community. By 1880 it numbered 1,161 people, most of them merchants and artisans, with doctors, lawyers and clerks among them. The congregation was Orthodox and kept a Hevra Kadisha and several charitable societies. Its school opened in 1856 and switched from German to Hungarian teaching in 1888.

Architecture and design

No description, plan, drawing or photograph of the eighteenth-century synagogue has been found. Gazda's survey classes the building as a synagogue and gives it a construction date of about 1750, and Gruber calls it the town's first synagogue, established in the mid-1700s. Neither source names an architect or builder, gives its dimensions or seating, or says whether it was built of timber, stone or brick, and its address is unknown. It is therefore not known whether it stood on the same plot as its successor in the old Jewish quarter around present-day Serház utca and Achim utca, or elsewhere in the town. Its style is recorded here as unknown. The only measurable hint of its scale is the size of the congregation it served, which grew from a few families when it was built to more than a thousand people by 1880, so the building may have been enlarged or supplemented by prayer rooms during its lifetime, but no source says so.

Life inside the synagogue

Little is recorded of worship in the old synagogue. The congregation was Orthodox, and Pinkas Hakehillot names two of the rabbis who served it while the building stood. Gabriel Senditc held the rabbinate for about fifty years until his death in 1868, which means he led the community for most of the first half of the nineteenth century. David Schuck was rabbi from 1864 to 1889, overlapping with Senditc's last years; he wrote Imre David, a work on the Talmudic tractate Hullin that was published at Munkács in 1890. Around the synagogue the community built up its institutions: the burial society, women's and charitable associations such as Malbish Arumim and a society for the poor of the town, and from 1856 a community school. Gruber notes that the Jews of the region bought, sold, produced and shipped kosher wine for much of central Europe, so the synagogue served a congregation whose economic life was bound up with the vineyards of Hegyalja.

Destruction

The old synagogue was destroyed by fire in 1890. Both Gazda's gazetteer and Gruber's Centropa article give that year and describe it as burned, Gruber calling the fire devastating; neither gives the date within the year, says how the fire started, or names anyone responsible, and no contemporary report of it was found. Whether the fire was confined to the synagogue or was part of a wider town fire is unknown. The building was not rebuilt. Instead the congregation used, or completed, a new and much larger synagogue, which Pinkas Hakehillot dates to 1889 and the JewishGen KehilaLinks page and the Jewish Guide to Europe date to 1890. The overlap of dates is unresolved: the new building may already have been under construction or finished when the old one burned, or the fire may have prompted its completion. No remains of the old building are recorded.

The community’s fate

The Jewish community of Tokaj numbered 959 in 1930 and 998 in 1944, according to Pinkas Hakehillot Hungary, and its last rabbi, Natan Halevi Jungreisz, had served since 1929. Anti-Jewish laws from 1938 damaged Jewish livelihoods, but the community kept its economic position until the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944. In April 1944 all the Jews of Tokaj were confined for a week in the new synagogue; the ghetto was then enlarged because of severe overcrowding, its entrances guarded by police, while Christian neighbours were allowed to bring food. In early May the Jews were taken to the ghetto at Sátoraljaújhely, and from 18 May until the end of the month they were deported to Auschwitz in four transports. Rabbi Jungreisz was among those murdered. After the war 112 survivors returned and, with help from the Joint, restarted communal life, but most soon left; by 1960 only three Jews remained in Tokaj.

The site today

The site of the eighteenth-century synagogue has not been identified in any source consulted, so what stands there today is unknown. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Tokaj and should not be read as the building's location. The congregation's later synagogue, built in 1889-90, stands in the former Jewish quarter and now houses a cultural and conference centre. Locating the older building would need eighteenth- and nineteenth-century town plans, the records of the 1890 fire, or local-history collections in Tokaj.

Notable names