Old Synagogue of Travnik (Il Kal Santo)

OVERVIEW

The story of Old Synagogue of Travnik (Il Kal Santo)

Travnik, in the Lašva valley of central Bosnia, was the seat of the Ottoman governors of Bosnia for about a century and a half, and Sephardi Jews from Sarajevo settled there from the end of the seventeenth century. The Sarajevo community chronology published by El Mundo Sefarad records under 1768 that the synagogue Il Kal Santo was built in Travnik and that the community received a yeshiva in the same year; the Encyclopaedia Judaica entry also says a kal santo existed from 1768, and Ivan Čerešnjes gives 1769. It was the community's first purpose-built house of prayer and, by these accounts, the second-oldest Jewish community building in Bosnia after Sarajevo's.

Almost nothing else about the building is documented. Samuel Gruber's 2011 survey for the US Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad and the Jewish Heritage Europe country page both state that this Old Synagogue was destroyed or torn down in 1860 and replaced that year by the New Synagogue, which Čerešnjes says rose on the foundations of its predecessor. That later building, used as a metal workshop after the Second World War and demolished in 2008, has its own entry. Older accounts do not separate the two buildings: the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) speaks instead of a wooden chapel of about 1840 replaced by a massive temple in 1863, and the memoirist Josef Konforti dated the community's only synagogue to the early nineteenth century.

LOCATION

Where it stood for 92 years

Historic: Travnik, at the foot of the Poturmahala quarter north of the čaršija (bazaar), presumed to be the plot of the later New Synagogue. Today: Šehida street, Musala neighbourhood, Travnik, site of the shopping centre built after 2008 (approximate).

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The Jewish community

Pinkas Hakehillot Yugoslavia says Sephardi Jews came to Travnik at the end of the seventeenth century, after Sarajevo was burned during the campaign of Prince Eugene of Savoy in 1697, and that Jewish money-changers had stayed in the town before that to do business with the vizier and his officials. A continuous community existed from the middle of the eighteenth century. Its oldest tombstones, in the cemetery at Bojna, date from 1762, and Josef Konforti, citing Moric Levi's book of 1911, writes that an independent community with a synagogue existed by 1768, second in age only to Sarajevo's. The first families remembered were Atias, Maestro, Altarac, Shalom, Gaon and Konforti. The community numbered 25 families in 1806. Its members were craftsmen, small traders, customs farmers and appraisers, and merchants trading with Sarajevo, Split, Dubrovnik, Venice and Trieste. In the early nineteenth century the French consul in Travnik lodged in the house of the merchant Joseph Baruch, and in 1818 or 1819 the community survived an accusation of ritual murder after the intervention of Muslim notables. In 1879 Travnik had about 375 Jews.

Architecture and design

No plan, drawing, photograph or written description of the eighteenth-century synagogue has been found. Its size, materials, layout and seating are unknown, and no architect or master builder is named in any source read. The detailed descriptions that survive, of a single ground-floor hall of about 150 square metres with stone foundations, walls of mud brick (ćerpič), women's galleries on two sides with their own outside stair, an ark called il ehal and a central teva surrounded by oak benches, belong to the synagogue that stood until 2008, as the Croatian and German Wikipedia articles present them. If Čerešnjes is right that the 1860 building was raised on the old foundations, the Kal Santo would have had roughly the same footprint and stood on the same plot at the foot of the Poturmahala quarter, north of the bazaar, but that is an inference from his statement rather than a documented fact. Before it was built, according to community tradition, the Jews prayed in the larger homes of wealthier members.

Life inside the synagogue

Konforti records the community's tradition that its synagogue was built by the members themselves: every man fit to make up a minyan worked after the afternoon prayer, carrying mud brick, mortar and beams for the masons, and Christians were not allowed to work on a building that was Kal santo, a holy house. Pinkas Hakehillot tells the same story of a building raised between the afternoon and evening prayers over three years. Konforti himself attached this tradition to the synagogue he knew, which he dated to the early nineteenth century, so it cannot be applied with certainty to the building of 1768. The El Mundo Sefarad chronology says the community also gained a yeshiva, a school of higher Talmudic study, in 1768. The language of the congregation was Ladino: boys learned from the age of four or five in the maldar to read the prayer book and translate the weekly Torah portion into Ladino, and the women's gallery was called the znogita, the little synagogue. Thanksgiving prayers for the community's deliverance from the accusation of 1818 or 1819 were still said many years later. No rabbi, cantor or warden of the old building is named in the sources read.

Destruction

The only sources that treat the Kal Santo as a building of its own give a single date for its end. Gruber's 2011 survey states that the Old Synagogue was built in 1768 and destroyed in 1860, and the Jewish Heritage Europe country page says the New Synagogue was built in 1860 to replace an eighteenth-century synagogue torn down that year. Čerešnjes, writing in 2008, says the new building rose on the foundations of the previous one. None of these sources explains why the old synagogue was removed or who took it down; the sequence suggests the community itself cleared it to rebuild, but that is not stated. Travnik suffered several great fires, and the German Wikipedia article suggests the building may have burned, but no source read records a fire at the synagogue before 1903. The account in the Jewish Encyclopedia and the El Mundo Sefarad chronology, of a wooden chapel of about 1840 replaced in 1863, may mean the old building was already gone by 1840, or that the chapel was a temporary successor. The exact sequence remains unresolved.

The community’s fate

The community outlived its first synagogue by eighty years and prayed in the New Synagogue built on its site. It numbered 472 Jews in 1910 and 261 in 1940, according to Pinkas Hakehillot. After the Independent State of Croatia was set up in April 1941, the Ustaše closed the synagogue, looted it and took its Torah scrolls. Mass arrests followed; Pinkas Hakehillot dates the start of deportations to 20 October 1941 and says the community was wiped out within ten months, while the German Wikipedia article, drawing on Eli Tauber's study of the Holocaust in Bosnia, places the first arrests in August 1941. The Jews of Travnik were taken to the Ustaše camp at Kruščica near Vitez and from there to Jasenovac, Stara Gradiška, Đakovo and other camps, where most were murdered. According to the same article only 16 returned, and 271 of the 296 Jews of Travnik and its surroundings were killed. In 1968 seventeen Jews lived in the town, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica records that the community was not renewed.

The site today

The plot of the Kal Santo has not been identified independently. If, as Čerešnjes states, the New Synagogue stood on its foundations, the site is the one on the main road through Travnik where the street climbs from the bazaar towards the fortress and the Varoš quarter, at the foot of Poturmahala. That later building was demolished in late August and early September 2008 to make way for a shopping centre, and nothing of either synagogue remains above ground. The map pin repeats the position used for the New Synagogue, on Šehida street in the Musala neighbourhood. The Jewish cemetery at Bojna, founded in 1762 and in use while the Kal Santo stood, survives on a hillside outside the town.

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