The story of Villány Synagogue
Villány is a town in southern Baranya county. Until the end of the Second World War most of its inhabitants were Danube Swabians, whose ancestors had come from the Fulda district around 1720, and the town was known in German as Willan. A post office opened at the end of 1867. A small Jewish community lived among this German-speaking population.
The main evidence for its synagogue comes from Anikó Gazda's gazetteer of Hungarian synagogues and Jewish communities, published in 1991 and based on a site survey carried out between 1980 and 1987. Gazda's survey records 136 Jews in Villány in 1910 and 57 in 1941, and a synagogue built in 1891 that had been demolished by the time of the survey. The Jewish cemetery survey published by JewishGen records Neolog burials from 1887 to 1944, which shows an organised congregation active in the same decades, and notes that some of the dead came from Ivánbaltyán, about seven kilometres away. No photograph, plan or description of the building was found, and no published history of the Villány community could be read for this entry. When and by whom the synagogue was pulled down is not recorded in any source consulted.
Where it stood for 96 years
Historic: Villány, Baranya county; street and house number unknown. Today: unknown; placeholder pin at the centre of 7773 Villány, Baranya county (approximate).
Open larger map →The Jewish community
Very little about the Jews of Villány has been published online. The JewishGen Cemetery Discovery Project, drawing on a survey made by Peter Wirth and Peter Tamas in January 1992, gives the Jewish population before the Second World War as 81 and states that no Jews live in the town today. The same survey describes the community's burials as Neolog, so the congregation followed the moderate, Congress wing of Hungarian Jewry rather than the Orthodox. Burials in the cemetery run from 1887 to 1944, and some of those buried there came from Ivánbaltyán, a neighbouring village about seven kilometres away, which suggests that Villány served as the religious centre for a few Jewish families in the surrounding settlements. Gazda's survey of 1980-87 records 136 Jews in 1910 and 57 in 1941 and gives no figure for 1828 or 1851; the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon of 1929 has no entry for the town. The community's founding date, its rabbis and its lay leaders are unknown. The occupations of Villány's Jews, the size of the community at its peak and the date when it first organised are all unknown.
Architecture and design
No photograph, drawing, plan or written description of the Villány synagogue was found in the archives and collections searched, including the photo collection of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, which holds the main series of views of derelict Hungarian synagogues taken in the 1940s to 1960s. The building's appearance therefore remains unknown. Gazda classes it as a synagogue proper rather than a prayer room in a house, and dates it to 1891. Whether it was a free-standing building or stood within a courtyard, and whether it had a women's gallery, is not recorded. The architect, the builder, the materials, the number of seats, the layout of the interior and the street on which the synagogue stood are all unknown. A community of about eighty people would have needed only a small building, and the synagogue was probably of modest size; this too is an inference from the population figure, not a documented fact.
Life inside the synagogue
No record of services, rabbis, cantors or teachers at the Villány synagogue was found. The congregation was Neolog, according to the cemetery survey, which places it in the Congress, or Neolog, organisation of Hungarian Jewry rather than among the Orthodox communities. Whether Villány ever had a rabbi of its own, or was attached to the rabbinate of a larger neighbouring town, is unknown, as are the names of any cantor, ritual slaughterer or teacher who served it. The community kept its own cemetery, in use for burials from 1887 to 1944, which implies that it also maintained a burial society. Families from Ivánbaltyán buried their dead there and probably attended services in the Villány synagogue on the High Holidays, though no source states this directly. The communal records, if they survive, have not been traced.
Destruction
No source found records damage to the Villány synagogue during the Second World War or in the months after the deportations of 1944, and no document of its sale or demolition was found. The building stood empty after the community was taken away in the spring and early summer of 1944. Anikó Gazda, whose survey of Hungarian synagogue sites was carried out between 1980 and 1987, records it as demolished, so it had disappeared by the mid-1980s at the latest. Whether it came down in the late 1940s, when the town's Swabian population was expelled and its houses resettled, or later under Communist rule, is unknown, and nothing read shows the building still standing after 1945. Who ordered or carried out the demolition, and whether the building was first sold by the surviving Jews or by the national Jewish office, is not recorded in any source consulted.
The community’s fate
Before the Second World War about 81 Jews lived in Villány. After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the Hungarian authorities concentrated the Jews of the provinces in ghettos and entrainment centres. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Pécs was the concentration and deportation centre for the Jews of Baranya and Tolna counties, and those gathered there were held in the Lakics army barracks before being deported to Auschwitz on 4 July 1944. No source read names Villány specifically, so whether its Jews passed through a local ghetto, perhaps at Siklós, before reaching Pécs is unknown. The number of Villány Jews murdered and the number who survived are unknown. The last burial in the Jewish cemetery is dated 1944, and no organised community is recorded after the war. A survey of 1992 found no Jews living in the town.
The site today
The site of the synagogue has not been identified in any source consulted, so it is not possible to say what occupies the plot today. No surviving fragment and no marker on the site is recorded. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of Villány and should not be read as the synagogue's location. The small Jewish cemetery, about 0.02 hectares, survives as an unfenced, unsigned plot; its stones were re-erected and the vegetation cleared during a restoration in 1991, and the local council is listed as its caretaker. Locating the synagogue will need cadastral maps or local records held in Siklós or Pécs.
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