The story of Turany Synagogue
Turany is an old market village on the Váh river at the northern end of the Turiec basin, about ten kilometres north-east of Martin. A synagogue stood here from the first half of the 19th century: the village's heritage listing on e-obce.sk names a 'synagogue from the first half of the 19th century' beside its Gothic Catholic church, Renaissance bell tower, Lutheran church of 1786 and Classicist parsonage. The English Wikipedia list of synagogues in Slovakia gives 1800 as the building date. The building is now gone. The heritage portal pamiatkynaslovensku.sk files it among vanished monuments and states that it was demolished in the 1980s, while the Wikipedia list says it was destroyed after 1980. No photograph, plan or description of the synagogue has been found, and its exact plot is not recorded in the sources read. What can be told with confidence is the story of the small Jewish community that built it: a group of families of shopkeepers and tradesmen who buried their dead in two cemeteries on the edge of the village, one of which still holds about fifty-four gravestones. Their community came to an end in the Holocaust, and the synagogue outlived the people who had prayed in it by some four decades.
Where it stood
Historic address unknown; pin at the point given by pamiatkynaslovensku.sk for the vanished synagogue, near Osloboditeľov 1000/34, 038 53 Turany, Martin district (approximate).
Open larger map →The Jewish community
Turany received town privileges in 1397 and grew as a centre of crafts and, from the late 19th century, of the timber industry: a sawmill leased in 1874 to the Budapest firm Schultz and Pollak went into full operation in 1887 and became the village's main employer. The village had 1,974 inhabitants in 1910 and 2,380 in 1940, according to the municipal history. When Jews first settled in Turany, how many lived there and which rite they followed are not stated in any source read; the Pinkas Hakehillot volume for Slovakia has an entry on the community, but it is not available online in translation. The municipal history names some of the Jewish residents of the 1930s and early 1940s: the butcher Móric Kukuk, who built a large family house with a butcher's shop, the baker Zelmanovič, Tibor Singer, two daughters of the Pollák family and the Klein sisters. The community kept two burial grounds. The older one, on Družstevná Street, is fenced and holds about 54 gravestones dated 1897 to 1973, inscribed in Hebrew and German; a second cemetery on the wooded slope behind Černík Street has lost all its stones.
Architecture and design
Nothing is known of the synagogue's architecture. No photograph, drawing, plan or written description of the building was found, and the sources that record it give only its approximate age, the first half of the 19th century (the Wikipedia list gives 1800). Its architect or builder, its materials, its size and the number of seats are all unknown, as is whether it had a women's gallery. Maroš Borský's survey of synagogue architecture in Slovakia, the standard work on the subject, does not discuss Turany in its text, and the building does not appear in the municipal history published by the town. Whether it was a free-standing building or a hall inside a house is likewise not stated, although its separate entry in the village's list of monuments, beside the churches and the parsonage, suggests a building of its own.
Life inside the synagogue
No record of religious life in the Turany synagogue has been found: no names of rabbis, cantors or ritual slaughterers, no community statutes and no account of services or festivals. Whether the congregation had its own rabbi or belonged to the rabbinate of a neighbouring town such as Martin is not stated in the sources read. The community's own traces lie mostly in its cemetery. The gravestones on Družstevná Street, inscribed in Hebrew and German, span the years 1897 to 1973, which shows that families were burying their dead here from the late 19th century and that a few Jews were buried in Turany even after the Holocaust. The Jewish families named in the municipal history ran a butcher's shop, a bakery and other shops in the village centre, and the synagogue would have served these households for daily, Sabbath and festival prayer.
Destruction
Who pulled the synagogue down, and why, is not recorded. The heritage portal pamiatkynaslovensku.sk, which lists the building among the vanished monuments of Slovakia and cites the town's website, says only that it was demolished in the 1980s. The English Wikipedia list of synagogues in Slovakia, in an unreferenced row, gives 1980 and the words 'Destroyed after 1980'. The building's existence and loss therefore rest on these two brief listings and on the old monument list repeated by e-obce.sk; no document, photograph or eyewitness account of the demolition was found. If the 1980s date is right, the building stood empty or in other use for some four decades after its congregation was deported, and was removed while Czechoslovakia was under Communist rule. The municipal chronicle records the opening of a new municipal office building in 1985 and other works in the village centre in the late 1980s, but it does not connect any of them with the synagogue.
The community’s fate
The Jews of Turany were deported during the Second World War, under the Slovak State ruled by Hlinka's Slovak People's Party (HSĽS). The municipal history records that many Jews were persecuted and some hid in the mountains, and that HSĽS commissioners were installed in the Jewish-owned shops. It names those taken in the first transport: two daughters of the Pollák family, the baker Zelmanovič, Tibor Singer, Móric Kukuk and the Klein sisters. The butcher Móric Kukuk died in a concentration camp together with his whole family. The date of the transports and the camps to which the others were sent are not given in the sources read, and the number of Turany Jews who were murdered or who survived is unknown. The gravestones in the old cemetery that date from after 1945, the latest from 1973, suggest that at least a few Jews lived in or returned to Turany after the war, but no organised congregation is recorded.
The site today
The synagogue no longer exists, and the sources read do not say exactly where it stood. The heritage portal pamiatkynaslovensku.sk gives coordinates for it in the centre of Turany, beside a block of flats on Osloboditeľov Street; how precise that point is cannot be checked. The village centre was rebuilt in the late 20th century, a reconstruction the municipal history says was completed in 1998. The clearest surviving trace of the Jewish community is the old Jewish cemetery on Družstevná Street, fenced and maintained by the municipality, with about 54 gravestones, many broken or fallen. The second Jewish cemetery, on the forested slope behind Černík Street, is overgrown and has no surviving stones.
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