Trenčianske Stankovce Synagogue (Sedličná)

OVERVIEW

The story of Trenčianske Stankovce Synagogue (Sedličná)

Sedličná is the youngest of the four villages that were merged in 1972 to form Trenčianske Stankovce, a municipality in the Trenčín district of western Slovakia. It is first mentioned in 1403 and belonged for centuries to families of the minor nobility; the cartographer János Lipszky was born there in 1766. Before 1918 it lay in the Trencsén county of the Kingdom of Hungary, where it was known as Szedliczna and, after the Hungarian renaming of place names, as Vágszállás.

The village's Jewish community was small but long-lived. Elek Fényes, in his geographical dictionary of 1851, counted 30 Jews among 221 inhabitants and listed a synagogue among the village's features, which is the earliest record of the building found. The census figures cited by the Hungarian Wikipedia show 45 Jews in 1890, 26 in 1921 and only 11 in 1930, so the congregation was already dwindling well before the Second World War.

Nothing is known about the building's appearance, date of construction or builder, and no photograph of it has been found. The synagogue and the Jewish cemetery of Sedličná have both disappeared. The Slovak sources say they were lost after the Second World War, while the Hungarian Wikipedia says the synagogue was destroyed during the war; neither gives a year.

LOCATION

Where it stood for 94 years

Historic: Szedliczna / Vágszállás, Trencsén county, Kingdom of Hungary; street and plot unknown. Today: Sedličná, part of Trenčianske Stankovce, 913 11, Trenčín district; approximate (village centre).

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The Jewish community

Jews were living in Sedličná by the first half of the nineteenth century. Elek Fényes's geographical dictionary of 1851 describes Szedliczna as a Slovak village in Trencsén county on the left bank of the Váh with 158 Catholic, 33 Lutheran and 30 Jewish inhabitants, fertile fields, meadows, pasture and woodland, and a synagogue; the post office was at Trencsén, an hour away. The census of 1890 recorded 45 Jews among 194 inhabitants, almost a quarter of the population. In 1921 there were 26 Jews among 217 residents, and in 1930 only 11 among 204. No source consulted describes their occupations, their families or the organisation of their congregation, and no community officers are named. Where the families who left after 1890 went is not recorded. Whether Sedličná formed an independent congregation or was attached to the larger community of Trenčín is unknown.

Architecture and design

No description, plan or photograph of the Sedličná synagogue has been found. Fényes's dictionary of 1851 records only that the village had a synagogue, and the later sources say only that it existed and has vanished. The building is not included in Maroš Borský's catalogue of extant and demolished synagogues in Slovakia (2005), and no record was found in the Slovak heritage gazetteer pamiatkynaslovensku.sk. Its date of construction, builder, materials, size, plan and style are therefore unknown. For a village congregation that never exceeded about 45 people, the synagogue was most likely a modest single-storey prayer house of masonry or timber, comparable to other rural synagogues of the Trenčín region, but that is an inference from the size of the community, not a documented fact. Where in the village it stood is also unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

No account of religious life in the Sedličná synagogue has been found. The congregation was very small throughout its recorded history: 30 Jews in 1851 and 45 at its peak in 1890 would barely have provided the ten adult men needed for communal prayer on ordinary days, and the decline to 26 in 1921 and 11 in 1930 suggests that regular services may already have been difficult to hold between the wars. The village also had its own Jewish cemetery, which shows that the community maintained at least a burial society. Its rabbinical affiliation, its religious orientation, the names of any rabbi, cantor or teacher, and whether it kept a school are all unknown. The nearest large congregation was in Trenčín, a few kilometres to the north-east.

Destruction

The sources disagree about when the synagogue disappeared, and none of them gives a year or names who was responsible. The Hungarian Wikipedia articles on Trencsénsztankóc and Vágszállás state, without a cited source, that the synagogue was destroyed during the Second World War. The Slovak Wikipedia article on Trenčianske Stankovce and a 2015 report by the Slovak news agency TASR on the history of the municipality say instead that the synagogue and the Jewish cemetery of Sedličná ceased to exist after the Second World War. The TASR wording, which appears to draw on the municipality's own history, is the more specific of the two, and the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative was told by the municipality that the cemetery was destroyed during the Communist era, which fits a postwar loss of the Jewish sites in the village. No document of demolition was found, and who pulled the synagogue down, and whether it was first sold, is not recorded.

The community’s fate

By 1930 only eleven Jews lived in Sedličná, and how many remained by 1942 is unknown. In 1942 most of the Jews of the region were deported to the Nazi extermination camps in occupied Poland. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, there were about 2,500 Jews in Trenčín and its surroundings on the eve of the deportations of 1942, 1,619 of them in Trenčín itself, and most of them perished in the extermination camps in Poland. The Jews of Sedličná were presumably among the Jews of the surrounding district, but no source consulted names them, says when or from where they were taken, or records whether any survived. In 1947 there were 228 Jews in Trenčín; no Jewish life is recorded in Sedličná after the war, and the village's Jewish cemetery was later destroyed.

The site today

The exact site of the synagogue is unknown, so it is not possible to say what occupies the plot today. Sedličná is now a quiet residential part of Trenčianske Stankovce, strung along the main road through the village. The former Jewish cemetery lies on road 507, about 200 metres south-west of road 1878; the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative surveyed it and found an unfenced plot with no surviving gravestones that has not been built over. No marker, memorial or surviving fragment of the synagogue is recorded. The map pin for this entry marks the centre of the Sedličná hamlet and should not be read as the synagogue's actual location.

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