Törökszentmiklós Synagogue

La comunidad judía

Jews settled in Törökszentmiklós in the first half of the nineteenth century. The 1840 census counted 45, and the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon notes ten families in 1842 who prayed in a room in the house of Farkas Stern and employed a functionary remembered as Reb Jechezkél. The first elders were Farkas Stern, József Weisz, József Moskovits and Sándor Schwartz. A burial society (Chevra Kadisa) was founded in 1854, and in 1855, when the community had grown to about fifty families, it elected its first rabbi, Pinkász Stein, and opened an elementary school that taught in Hungarian from the start. Two years later the bequest of the physician Nathan Austerlitz paid for a synagogue and school building. A women's association followed in 1870 and a society for clothing the poor in 1897. Numbers reached 663 in 1880 and a peak of 755 in 1910, falling to about 670 in the late 1920s, when the lexicon listed 200 families, most of them traders, craftsmen and clerks, with Szajol and Tiszapüspöki attached to the registry district.

Arquitectura y diseño

Historic photographs show a rectangular, plastered hall under a pitched roof, its gable end facing the street. The front carried a low triangular pediment edged with a decorative frieze and pierced by a round window; ball finials stood at the corners and, on the early postcard, a Star of David at the apex. Below, a portico of four stout columns with ornamented capitals supported a flat terrace whose parapet was set with panels of foliage relief. Above the terrace sat the Tablets of the Law, flanked on the postcard by two lions that had gone by 1950, and two small round-headed windows. The long side walls were divided by pilasters into bays with tall round-arched windows. Inside, women's galleries with panelled and balustraded fronts ran along the sides on slender columns. The flat ceiling was painted with geometric panels and rosettes. The east end closed in a shallow polygonal niche painted with draperies, holding an Ark framed by two columns and a pediment, with a large round window above. A raised bimah enclosed by a wrought-iron railing stood before the Ark. The designer is not recorded in the sources consulted.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

Under Pinkász Stein, rabbi from 1855 to 1886, the congregation was organised on conservative lines; his regulations were still in force in 1929. At the schism of Hungarian Jewry it refused both camps and remained Status Quo, later registered as a Congress (Neolog) community on condition that this would not alter its inner life, and in 1924 formally returned to Status Quo. Stein's son Mayer Miksa Stein succeeded him and, though equally conservative, preached in Hungarian in the temple. Dr Mór Weisz, rabbi from 1896 to 1915, was a noted preacher and scholar who wrote the history of the local burial society; his funeral service was held in the synagogue. Hermann Strausz served briefly from 1919, and József Herskovits was elected in 1925. Around the synagogue stood the community school with a Talmud Torah course, and the burial society, women's association and a branch of the cultural association OMIKE worked alongside it. During the First World War the community maintained a hospital; 75 members served and 14 fell.

Destrucción

In the spring of 1944, under Nazi German occupation, the Hungarian authorities forced the Jews of the town into ghettos and in June removed them to Szolnok. A photograph in the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives shows the emptied synagogue in June and July 1944 in use as an assembly workshop, with machines and workbenches standing in front of the Ark; an account derived from Pinkas Hakehillot attributes the conversion to the Nazis and calls it a garage. Survivors repaired the building after the war and prayed in it again, and it was still intact and in the hands of the Jewish community when it was photographed in 1950 and 1960. As the congregation dwindled the building lost its users, and in 1980 it was demolished by the Communists: the Jewish weekly Új Élet records that those in power under the atheist regime had the house of prayer bulldozed. The sources consulted do not say which body ordered the work or the exact date, and the martyrs' tablet was moved to the Jewish cemetery.

El destino de la comunidad

The 1941 census counted 520 Jews in Törökszentmiklós. Men were called up for forced labour service, and more than twenty are reported to have died on the eastern front. After the Nazi German occupation of March 1944 the Hungarian authorities set up ghettos in the town for local Jews and those of six nearby villages, 683 people according to one account. In June they were taken to the collection camp at the Szolnok sugar factory, where 4,666 Jews from the region were held, and deported by Hungarian gendarmerie in two transports at the end of the month, one to Strasshof in Austria and one to Auschwitz. Rabbi József Herskovits and his family were taken from Szolnok to Budapest before the Auschwitz train left and are reported to have survived. Most of those sent to Austria returned; few came back from Auschwitz. The survivors recorded 319 murdered members of the community on a marble tablet. Many younger people left for Israel after 1948, about 90 Jews remained in 1962, and the community later ceased to exist.

El lugar hoy

The synagogue plot at the corner of Bocskai út and Batthyány út is now occupied by a multi-storey residential building. In front of it, on the Bocskai út side, a small memorial with a plaque placed in 2014 by the town council and the Szolnok Jewish community states that the synagogue stood here from 1857 to 1980. Nothing of the synagogue itself is known to survive above ground. The marble tablet with the names of the 319 victims, once inside the synagogue, was moved to the Jewish cemetery on Tenyői út, where the municipality built a new setting for the names in 2026.

Nombres destacados