Historia Valpovo Synagogue
Valpovo lies in present-day Osijek-Baranja county in eastern Slavonia; the JewishGen register gives its older names as Valpó, Walpowo and Valpach. In the eighteenth century it was the seat of a large manorial estate. Its Jewish community, according to the JewishGen cemetery register, was founded in the nineteenth century. It opened a cemetery in 1860 and built a synagogue in 1898.
Almost everything known about the building comes from a single line in the International Jewish Cemetery Project's entry for Valpovo, compiled from data supplied by Srdjan Matić in 1999: the synagogue was built in 1898 and destroyed in 1941. The same entry records that the Jewish community existed until 1941 and gives population figures taken from Ruth Ellen Gruber's travel guide: 157 Jews in 1925/26, 175 in 1931 and 140 in 1937/38, and none in 1947 or 1994.
No description, photograph, plan, street address or name of an architect, rabbi or community leader was found in any source read for this entry. Local histories of Valpovo consulted online deal with the manor and its schools and say nothing about the town's Jews. The building is not on the English Wikipedia list of synagogues in Croatia. The entry is therefore deliberately thin and records what little is documented.
Where it stood for 43 years
Historic: Valpovo (Valpó); street and house number unknown. Today: unknown; placeholder pin at the centre of Valpovo, 31550, Osijek-Baranja county (approximate).
Otwórz większą mapę →Społeczność żydowska
The community was small and late. The JewishGen register says it was established in the nineteenth century; the cemetery, the community's first recorded institution, dates from 1860, and the synagogue followed in 1898, which suggests that the congregation had reached a size and a degree of prosperity by the end of the century that justified a building of its own. No source read for this entry describes the occupations or names of Valpovo's Jews. The community's population is known only for the interwar years: 157 in 1925/26, 175 at the 1931 census and 140 in 1937/38, figures from Ruth Ellen Gruber's 1992 guide quoted in the register. The register refers readers also to nearby Donji Miholjac, and whether the two congregations shared a rabbi is unknown. Its religious affiliation, Neolog or Orthodox, is also unknown.
Architektura i projekt
Nothing is known about the appearance of the Valpovo synagogue beyond its construction date of 1898. No photograph, postcard, drawing, plan or written description was found in the sources consulted, and none is listed in the project's own survey of Croatian sources. Its architect, builder, size, seating capacity and style are all unknown, and its street address has not been identified. Zlatko Karač's surveys of synagogue architecture in Croatia, which are the most likely published source for its appearance, could not be read for Valpovo in this run: his 2009 article on Osijek's Lower Town synagogue, which compares many Slavonian buildings, does not mention it. Any further description will depend on Karač's 2020 book, on the Kraus volume on Croatian synagogues, or on local archives in Valpovo and Osijek.
Życie w synagodze
No account of religious life in the Valpovo synagogue was found. The names of its rabbis, cantors, teachers and lay leaders are unknown, as is whether the congregation kept a school, a burial society or women's and charitable associations of the kind common in Slavonian Jewish communities. The cemetery founded in 1860 implies at least a burial society from that time. With between 140 and 175 members in the interwar years, the congregation was large enough to hold regular services on Sabbaths and festivals, and the synagogue would have been the centre of its religious and social life for the four decades it stood. Whether it ever had a rabbi of its own or was served from Osijek, Donji Miholjac or another neighbouring town is unknown. No ritual objects, Torah scrolls or furnishings from the building are known to survive in a museum. Records of the community, if they survived 1941, might be held by the Jewish Community of Osijek, the State Archives in Osijek or the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade, none of which was consulted for this entry.
Zniszczenie
The only source found, the JewishGen International Jewish Cemetery Project entry for Valpovo, states that the synagogue was destroyed in 1941 and that the community was closed in the same year. It does not say in which month, how the building was destroyed, or by whom. In April 1941 Valpovo became part of the Independent State of Croatia, the Ustaše regime set up under Nazi German and Fascist Italian patronage, and that year Jewish property across the state was seized and many synagogues were wrecked or pulled down. In nearby Osijek, on 13 April 1941, a mob of local Germans (Volksdeutsche) and Ustaše burned the main synagogue, according to the Jewish Virtual Library. It is likely that the Valpovo building was destroyed in the same wave, but no source read connects any named group to Valpovo, so who destroyed it is not recorded. It is also not clear whether 'destroyed' means demolished outright, burned, or wrecked inside and later removed.
Los społeczności
The register records that the Jewish community of Valpovo ceased to exist in 1941 and that no Jews lived in the town in 1947. The individual fate of Valpovo's roughly 140 Jews has not been traced for this entry, but the Jews of the Osijek region shared a common path. According to the Jewish Virtual Library and the English Wikipedia's account of the Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia, the Ustaše authorities in June 1942 forced the Osijek Jewish community to build a so-called Jewish settlement at Tenja, outside Osijek, where about 3,000 Jews from Osijek and other places in the region were confined in June and July 1942. In August 1942 they were deported, about 200 to the Ustaše camp at Jasenovac and about 2,800 to Auschwitz. Of some 39,000 Jews in the Independent State of Croatia in 1941, more than 30,000 were murdered. How many Valpovo Jews were among them, and how many survived, is unknown. No community was re-established after the war, and the Jewish cemetery was sold in 1970.
Miejsce dzisiaj
The site of the synagogue has not been identified, so it is not known what stands there today. No source read gives a street or plot, and no surviving remains are recorded. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Valpovo as returned by OpenStreetMap and should not be read as the synagogue's location. The Jewish cemetery, on Repnjak Street, survived the war but was sold in 1970; the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative found it demolished and built over, with no gravestones preserved and the ground occupied by a recycling yard.
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Zdjęcia, dokumenty, historie rodzinne lub wspomnienia o tej synagodze i jej społeczności pomagają zachować jej historię.
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