Shomre Torah Synagogue of Topoľčany

Еврейская община

Jewish settlement in Topoľčany is documented from 11 December 1649, when Count Adam Forgács signed a contract at Hlohovec Castle with five Jews from Uherský Brod and Uherské Hradiště in Moravia, leasing them the right to collect the toll in what was then an important market town. By the eighteenth century an organised community existed: the census of 1735 counted 50 Jews, and by 1755 there were a cemetery, a synagogue and a burial society. A yeshiva founded in 1810 in a communal house on Lipová Street, next to the old synagogue, made the town a centre of Talmudic learning in the nineteenth century. After the schism of 1869 the community chose the Orthodox stream. It built the Great Synagogue, dedicated in 1898, and after the First World War the Rosenthal family endowed a third prayer hall in memory of a son killed in the war; there were also several smaller prayer rooms. Between the wars Jews made up about a third of the town's population, and in autumn 1941 Topoľčany had 3,066 Jews, the sixth-largest Jewish population of any Slovak town, with Jews living in a further 51 villages of the district.

Архитектура и дизайн

The Shomre Torah synagogue was a free-standing masonry building in the late Baroque style, set in a courtyard behind ordinary houses rather than on the street. Borský describes the whole compound as closed off and hidden behind a modest street front, entered through a vaulted passageway, which was typical of Jewish building before emancipation, when communities were often required to keep their synagogues out of sight of Christian neighbours. The synagogue itself was simply decorated and covered by a hipped roof. On the east façade a small round window, flanked by round-arched windows, marked the position of the Torah ark inside. According to the memorial book the main floor lay a few steps below street level, in keeping with the verse of Psalm 130, 'Out of the depths I cry unto thee', a practice Borský also notes in old synagogues elsewhere. The plan, a west elevation and views of the passage and of the east and west façades were published by Borský, but no interior view is known. The architect, the exact date of building, the seating capacity and the arrangement of the ark, bimah and women's section are unknown.

Жизнь в синагоге

For most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries this was the synagogue of the whole Topoľčany community, and the rabbis who led it worked from the compound around it. Rabbi Abraham Ulman, chief rabbi from 1810 to 1825, founded the yeshiva in the communal house beside the old synagogue together with Asher Anshel Roth, a native of the town who served as second rabbi; under later chief rabbis such as Benjamin Wolf Lev the yeshiva drew students from afar. Ritual slaughter and the kosher butcher shops were housed in the same courtyard. After the Great Synagogue opened in 1898 the old building remained in use as a separate congregation, Shomre Torah ('Guardians of the Torah'). Its last rabbi was Shimon Zvi Haberfeld, dayan of the community, who led the community's religious affairs after the chief rabbi Abraham Eliezer Weiss left for Hungary in 1942; the memorial book also names the synagogue's last janitor, Mr. Schmiedel. Prayers were held in the Old Synagogue until the expulsions of 1942, when it was closed.

Разрушение

The Shomre Torah synagogue was closed in 1942 when most of the town's Jews were deported, and no source found records damage to it in the war; it was the Great Synagogue that was burned in 1944. After the war the empty building was not returned to worship. The memorial book says it became a storeroom until 1960, when it was pulled down to make room for apartments; in that year all the buildings on the site, including the old synagogue and the yeshiva, were demolished, although experts reckoned them to be about two hundred years old. Borský gives the date as the 1960s, as does the Slovak heritage site Pamiatky na Slovensku, and he records that a photographic survey was made before demolition. The demolition took place under the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, and the new flats point to a municipal or state housing scheme, but no source consulted names the body that ordered or carried out the demolition, or says whether the site was first sold.

Судьба общины

Under the Slovak State, allied with Nazi Germany, deportations began in March 1942: more than 220 young Jews of Topoľčany were taken, the young men from the Nováky camp to Lublin-Majdanek on 27 and 31 March and the young women from the Patronka camp in Bratislava to Auschwitz on 28 March. Whole families followed from the spring; the memorial book says 79 percent of the community was deported in 1942, mostly to death camps in occupied Poland, and that 618 Jews remained after September. When Nazi German forces occupied the town in early September 1944, about a thousand Jews were seized and on 8 September taken by train to the Sereď camp, from where most were sent to Auschwitz. Jews found hiding near the town were murdered on the spot. About 320 survivors lived in Topoľčany in 1947, under the community head Philip Nagel. On 24 September 1945 a mob of local residents, joined by soldiers sent to stop it, attacked them, injuring 47 people and plundering Jewish property; most survivors emigrated by 1949, and services in the Rosenthal prayer hall ended in 1965.

Место сегодня

The synagogue, the yeshiva and the other buildings of the old Jewish compound were cleared in 1960 and apartment buildings were put up on the site. The compound lay in the centre of Topoľčany behind the former Riders' Barracks, off the former Lipová Street, with the chief rabbi's house facing the market square, but no source consulted gives a present-day street address or the exact plot. A street called Lipová exists in Topoľčany today, about a kilometre north of the centre, but it has not been shown to be the same street, so the map pin for this entry marks the town centre and not the synagogue itself. No part of the building is known to survive, and no marker on the site is recorded.

Значимые имена