Uherský Brod Synagogue

La comunità ebraica

A Jew is first named in the town records in 1470, when about sixteen Jewish families are mentioned. Around 1590 the noble Kunovic family allowed four families to settle behind the walls. The community numbered 18 families in 1615 and 438 people in 1683, the year of the plague and the Kuruc massacre, after which many survivors moved to Upper Hungary and founded new communities there. Around 1745 there were about 940 Jews in some 160 families. Under the Familiants Law of 1726 the Jews were confined to their own quarter, which was fully separated from the Christian town by about 1780 to 1790. The community reached its peak in 1857 with 1,068 Jews, about a quarter of the population, and then declined as families moved to larger cities: 873 in 1880, 825 in 1900, 718 in 1910 and 493 in 1930, about eight per cent of the inhabitants. Encyclopaedia Judaica counts about twenty noted rabbis from the seventeenth century onwards, among them David ben Samuel ha-Levi, author of the Turei Zahav.

Architettura e design

The only view found is a photograph of about 1940 credited to the museum in Uherský Brod. It shows a large free-standing rendered hall under a very tall, steep hipped roof of tiles with small dormer openings. The long side wall is divided by flat pilasters into bays, each with a tall round-headed window, and the walls are finished with a simple cornice. On the end wall facing the street there are two round-arched doorways side by side, each framed by pilasters and crowned by a small pediment, one segmental and one triangular, with a round oculus window above them in the gable wall. In front, a low wall with masonry posts and wire fencing encloses a narrow forecourt with young trees. The overall form, a plain hall with a massive roof, is typical of Moravian synagogues of the early eighteenth century, but the date of the pilasters and door surrounds, which may come from a later remodelling, is unknown. The architect, builder, seating capacity and interior layout are also unknown, and no interior view was found.

La vita nella sinagoga

The synagogue was the religious centre of a congregation that was long one of the largest in Moravia. Its rabbis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries included Moses Nascher (1844 to 1854), Moses David Hoffmann (1864 to 1889), Moritz (Meir) Jung (1890 to 1912) and Kalman Nürnberger (1913 to 1939), the last rabbi. Hermann Roth, Hoffmann and Jung supported German-language Jewish schools in the town. In 1872 the congregation split over proposals to move the bimah from the centre of the hall and to introduce a choir, the classic dispute between traditionalists and reformers of that period; how it was resolved in this building is not recorded. Jung founded a Jewish gymnasium in 1891 that combined Jewish studies with general education, and a yeshiva was founded a few years before the First World War. By 1939 the community also used a second, smaller synagogue, remembered as the Malý templ (small temple).

Distruzione

In 1941, under the Nazi German occupation, the synagogue was set on fire. The Jewish Museum and Terezín Initiative leaflet on the Uherský Brod transports states that it was burned by Czech fascists in 1941, and Encyclopaedia Judaica likewise says that local fascists set fire to the great synagogue; neither source names an organisation or individuals. A USC Shoah Foundation walk for the town includes a photograph titled 'the synagogue after the fire of 21 to 22 July 1941', which gives the date, whereas Encyclopaedia Judaica places the fire at the end of 1941. The fire came in the same year in which the head of the community, Felix Brunn, and seven board members were arrested by the Gestapo and executed. The Jüdische Gemeinden survey says the synagogue was partly destroyed in 1941 and later demolished. When the ruin was cleared, and by whom, is not recorded in any source read; the same survey says the old Jewish quarter as a whole was pulled down after the Second World War and replaced by new housing.

Il destino della comunità

In March 1939 Uherský Brod had 489 Jews. After the Nazi German occupation they were registered, stripped of property and from May 1941 crowded into houses in the former Jewish quarter. In 1941 the community head Felix Brunn and seven board members were arrested by the Gestapo and executed on a charge of underground anti-German activity. In 1942 the Nazi authorities made the town a concentration point for the Jews of south-eastern Moravia, including some 350 brought from Uherské Hradiště, so that the Jewish population rose from about 800 to almost 3,000. In January 1943 they were assembled in the grammar school near the railway station and sent to the Terezín ghetto in three transports, designated Cn, Co and Cp; most were later deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Jewish Museum in Prague gives 2,862 deportees and 197 survivors; Encyclopaedia Judaica gives 2,837 deportees and 81 survivors. About 30 Jews returned after the war and a community was re-established in 1949, but most members left for Israel within a few years.

Il luogo oggi

The synagogue no longer exists and its exact plot has not been identified in any source read. It stood in the former Jewish quarter, which according to the Jüdische Gemeinden survey was largely demolished after the Second World War and replaced by a modern housing estate, so that few original buildings remain. The map pin for this entry is therefore a placeholder at the centre of Uherský Brod and does not mark the synagogue site. The town's new Jewish cemetery survives with a memorial to the Holocaust victims and about eighty Baroque and Classicist gravestones moved there from the old cemetery, whose own site shows few traces today. A Torah scroll from the community survives in the United States.

Nomi importanti