הסיפור של Velká Dobrá Synagogue
Velká Dobrá lies in the Kladno district of Central Bohemia, about 4 kilometres south-west of Kladno and 16 kilometres north-west of Prague. The village is first mentioned in 1328, when two small strongholds stood in the area, and today has about 1,800 inhabitants. In the German-language records of the Habsburg period it appears as Gross-Dobray.
Like many villages of the Bohemian countryside, it had Jewish residents in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Jiří Fiedler's survey of Jewish monuments in Bohemia and Moravia lists Velká Dobrá among the Jewish religious communities and associations in the neighbourhood of Kladno and gives a single line about its house of worship: a synagogue built in 1805 and demolished before the middle of the twentieth century. Fiedler distinguishes in the same passage between synagogues and prayer rooms inside ordinary houses, as at nearby Unhošť, which indicates that Velká Dobrá had a building of its own rather than a rented room.
Nothing else about the building has been found: no photograph, plan, description, address or record of the congregation's rabbis or officers. The community was one of a cluster of small rural congregations around Kladno, alongside Hostouň, Slaný, Unhošť and Zlonice, all of them recorded by Fiedler in the same entry.
Where it stood for 145 years
Historic: Gross-Dobray (Velká Dobrá), Bohemia; street and house number unknown. Today: Velká Dobrá, Kladno district, Central Bohemian Region, 273 61; site unknown, placeholder pin at the municipality (approximate).
פתיחת מפה גדולה ←הקהילה היהודית
Almost nothing has been published on the Jews of Velká Dobrá. Fiedler records a Jewish religious community or association there, and the fact that it put up a synagogue in 1805 shows that by the early nineteenth century it had enough families and means to build and keep a house of prayer. It belonged to a dense network of small village congregations west of Prague. At Hostouň, 7 kilometres from Kladno, a synagogue was built in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and the community reached about 60 families in the middle of the nineteenth century; Slaný had a community of about 200 people around 1880. In Kladno itself a Jewish prayer association is documented only from 1864, becoming an independent religious community by 1893 at the latest, and in 1932 the Hostouň community was attached to it. The size of the Velká Dobrá community, the names of its families, whether it had its own cemetery and when it ceased to exist are all unknown. It is likely, but not documented, that its remaining members joined the Kladno community as the village congregation dwindled.
אדריכלות ועיצוב
No photograph, drawing, plan or written description of the Velká Dobrá synagogue has been found, so its appearance is unknown. The only architectural fact recorded is its date: Fiedler gives the year 1805. Fiedler calls it a synagogue, using the word he keeps for separate buildings, and not a prayer room in a dwelling, the term he uses in the same text for Unhošť; it is therefore treated here as a purpose-built synagogue. Its architect or builder, materials, size, seating capacity and the arrangement of its interior, including whether it had a women's gallery, are unknown. No surviving fittings, such as a Torah ark or ritual objects, are known to have come from it.
החיים בבית הכנסת
No records of religious life in the Velká Dobrá synagogue have been found. The names of any rabbis, teachers, cantors or community leaders who served there are unknown, and it is not recorded whether the community employed its own teacher and ritual slaughterer, as many village congregations of its size did, or shared them with a neighbouring community. Fiedler's entry counts Velká Dobrá among the Jewish religious communities and associations of the Kladno area, which implies regular services at least for a time after 1805. The archive of the Kladno Jewish community, now held by the Jewish Museum in Prague, includes registers of communities affiliated to it and records of mergers with surrounding communities; it may contain material on Velká Dobrá, but it was not consulted. How long the building remained in use for worship, and whether it was still used when the Second World War began, is unknown.
הרס
Fiedler records only that the synagogue of 1805 was demolished before the middle of the twentieth century. No source found gives a year, the reason for the demolition, or who carried it out, and it is not known whether the building had already been abandoned or sold by the community before it was pulled down. No evidence was found that it was damaged in November 1938 or during the Nazi German occupation that began in March 1939. Because the demolition may have taken place before 1939, during the occupation, or in the years just after 1945, it cannot be attributed to any particular regime or actor. Who demolished the Velká Dobrá synagogue is not recorded.
גורל הקהילה
It is not known whether any Jews still lived in Velká Dobrá when Nazi Germany occupied Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. Any who did, and any members of the former village community who had moved to Kladno, were caught up in the persecution that followed. According to the Jüdische Gemeinden account of Kladno, part of the Jewish population had already left before the occupation, and those who remained were deported together with many Jews from the surrounding region to the Theresienstadt (Terezín) ghetto in February 1942, from where most were sent on to the Nazi extermination camps in occupied Poland. A Terezín Memorial publication on the Kladno transports records two large transports, designated Y and Z, which deported 1,631 people in all; 123 of them survived the war. The names of victims from Velká Dobrá have not been identified in the sources consulted. A Kladno Jewish community was re-established after the war but was disbanded in the 1970s.
האתר כיום
The exact site of the synagogue in Velká Dobrá has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not possible to say what stands on the plot today. No remains of the building are recorded, and no marker or memorial to it is known. The map pin for this entry marks the municipality of Velká Dobrá as geocoded by OpenStreetMap and should not be read as the synagogue's location. Historic cadastral maps of the village or the records of the Kladno district archive might show where it stood.
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