Old Synagogue of Úsov

הקהילה היהודית

The first record of a Jew in Úsov dates from 1564. In 1564 seven Jews (possibly families) are listed, about nine families around 1590, and by 1600 Jews lived in nine houses. Their quarter, established in 1589, lay on a hill in the north-west of the town, and KehilaLinks records a first resident rabbi by 1609, David ben Jacob. The Thirty Years' War devastated the quarter and nearly ended the community; its medieval cemetery was destroyed by Swedish soldiers near the end of the war, and a new one was laid out around 1645 to 1650. There were ten families in 1657 and eleven around 1670, and the community grew partly through newcomers, among them Jews from Poland. It was in this period of recovery that the synagogue of about 1690 was built. Growth continued after its loss: 59 families were counted in 1753, and the quarter had about 45 two-storey houses around 1750. The community reached its peak of about 110 families, roughly 650 people, around 1830.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

No description, plan or view of the synagogue of about 1690 has been found, and nothing is known of its size, materials, plan, appearance or builder. The sources agree only on its position. It stood within the Jewish quarter on the hill, in the centre of that quarter according to KehilaLinks, and the synagogue built in the early 1780s was put up on exactly the same site, as KehilaLinks, the Encyclopaedia Judaica and Jüdische Gemeinden all state. The building was erected with the permission, or on the order, of the Catholic dean of Müglitz, which suggests it was an officially sanctioned communal synagogue rather than a private prayer room, though its form remains unknown. Because the later synagogue occupies the plot, the footprint of the earlier one may have been similar, but no source says so. The architect, the capacity and the style are unknown.

החיים בבית הכנסת

Almost nothing is recorded about worship in the synagogue during its roughly thirty years of use. KehilaLinks lists David Twele Aschkenasi as rabbi of Úsov about 1722, so he was probably the community's rabbi in its last years. The one event documented in detail is the one that ended its life. On the eve of Yom Kippur 1721, which KehilaLinks gives as 30 September 1721, a priest, named there as Samuel Gelinek from Dubitzko, entered the synagogue during the service. The Jewish Encyclopedia says he began preaching a missionary sermon and, when the officers of the congregation asked him to leave and he refused, they put him out by force. According to KehilaLinks he struck the worshippers with a stick, fell, and then accused them of injuring him. Jüdische Gemeinden reports only that a Jew allegedly assaulted the local chaplain. The incident took place in front of the whole congregation on the holiest night of the Jewish year.

הרס

The priest's complaint led to a long lawsuit. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the lower courts in Brno and Prague dealt with the case first, and the supreme court in Vienna overruled them and ordered the synagogue destroyed and public services prohibited. The Jewish Encyclopedia says that after a protracted lawsuit the decision was that the synagogue be destroyed and that no other be built. The sentence fell on four men: three were branded with a hot iron and exiled, and the fourth, a man of 74, was condemned to work on a Catholic church then being built. KehilaLinks dates the demolition order to 1722. Jüdische Gemeinden, which gives no date, says it was popular fury in the town ("Volkswut") that led to the synagogue's demolition. The building was therefore pulled down on the order of the supreme court in Vienna, against a background of hostility among the town's Christian population; the sources do not say who physically carried out the demolition. Services moved to private houses.

גורל הקהילה

After the demolition the clergy tried in 1737 to forbid even private prayer, but the authorities upheld it. In 1753 the dayyan Abraham Broda Leipniker obtained permission for prayer rooms, and a new synagogue on the old site followed in the early 1780s. The community declined after 1848 as families moved to larger towns; from 1850 to 1919 the Jewish quarter was a separate municipality. About 150 Jews lived there in 1890, when the congregation was joined to the Šumperk district. Twenty families remained in 1930 and nineteen in 1938. At the end of 1938 local Nazis wrecked the interior of the later synagogue and burned the community archive, and the cemetery was later used as a shooting range. How the remaining Jews were deported has not been established in the sources read; as far as is known, only one Jew of Úsov survived the Holocaust.

האתר כיום

The site of the demolished synagogue is occupied by its successor, the synagogue built in the early 1780s (1784 according to Jüdische Gemeinden and the Encyclopaedia Judaica) on the same plot in the former Jewish quarter, today on the street called U Synagogy. After 1945 it was used by the Czech Brethren Protestant church until the early 1990s. A private owner then bought and restored it over more than a decade and gave it to the Jewish community of Olomouc; it opened in 2008 as a museum with an exhibition on the Jewish history of the region. No visible remains of the earlier building are recorded. The Jewish cemetery, with more than 500 gravestones, survives nearby.

שמות בולטים