Vimperk Synagogue

La comunidad judía

Jews are recorded in the Vimperk area from the time of the Thirty Years' War, settled under the protection of the local lords. The main settlement was at Čkyně, whose community reached its peak in the 1840s with more than 200 members and had an Empire-style synagogue of 1828 and a cemetery with about 500 graves. After 1850 many Jews left or died out there, while Vimperk grew. Newcomers from Galicia and other parts of the Habsburg monarchy enlarged the Vimperk congregation, and in the autumn of 1914 about fifty families of Jewish war refugees, some 300 people, arrived in the town. Around 1900 most Jewish men were merchants and shop employees. Jüdische Gemeinden counts 76 Jews in Vimperk and 119 in the judicial district in 1923, about twenty families around 1930 and 57 Jews in 1934. Around 1930 the community covered the judicial districts of Vimperk and Volary (Wallern). The same source notes that antisemitic currents grew in the town in these years.

Arquitectura y diseño

The plot was bought from the town in 1924 for 11,430 crowns. The building was put up by the local builder Josef Schmidt under the supervision of the architect Louis Wolt of České Budějovice, at a cost of about 105,000 crowns. Contemporary description calls it a modern two-storey building that suited the surrounding villa quarter. The prayer hall and the community office were on the ground floor and a flat for the rabbi on the upper floor. The hall had a richly decorated ceiling and walls and both traditional and electric lighting, and seated about 70 to 80 people on benches. The one photograph found, taken in the late 1920s, shows a plain rendered block with a shallow hipped roof and tall windows. A lower front wing holds three tall windows with Stars of David in their glazing, framed by flat pilaster strips under a simple cornice, and the entrance stands in a recessed corner beside it.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

The synagogue was dedicated on 3 January 1926 in the presence of representatives of neighbouring Jewish communities, district and town officials and almost the whole town council. Rabbi Max Hoch of Plzeň performed the dedication; Jüdische Gemeinden also names the rabbis Julius Löwenbein and Arnold Flaschner of Strakonice as taking part, and says the music was directed by Heinrich Schlattner, choirmaster in Vimperk. The congregation brought two objects from the closed synagogue at Čkyně: a candelabrum and a Torah curtain (parochet), both then nearly a hundred years old. The building also served as the community's administrative seat, with its office on the ground floor, and was planned with a flat for a rabbi upstairs. No resident rabbi, cantor or community president of the years 1926 to 1938 is named in the sources consulted, and nothing is recorded of the order of services or of particular events held in the building during its short life.

Destrucción

After the Munich Agreement of September 1938, Vimperk was annexed to Nazi Germany as part of the Sudetenland, and most of the town's Jewish and Czech inhabitants fled inland. During the November Pogrom, on 10 November 1938, local Nazis set fire to the synagogue and burned all of its furnishings, as both the Vimperk local history article and Jüdische Gemeinden state; a commemorative plaque on the site also says the Nazis destroyed it on that date. The walls survived the fire and the burnt-out shell stood empty for several years. In 1941 Dr. Erich Finger, a Vimperk physician, bought the ruin, on condition that it be demolished according to the Czech Institute of Art History's memorial database, and had it pulled down at once to gain the building plot. No source consulted records what happened to the candelabrum and Torah curtain brought from Čkyně.

El destino de la comunidad

Most of Vimperk's Jews left the town in the autumn of 1938, when the Sudetenland was annexed, and moved into the remaining Czech lands. There they came under Nazi rule again after the occupation of March 1939. Those who could not emigrate in time were later deported. Jüdische Gemeinden records that deportations of Jews from the Prachatice district began in November 1942, with two large transports leaving Klatovy for the Theresienstadt ghetto, and that most of the deportees were murdered. The memorial plaque on the site states that most members of the Vimperk Jewish community were killed by the Nazis. The exact number of Vimperk Jews who died, and how many survived, was not found in the sources consulted. No Jewish community was re-established in Vimperk after the war. The old cemetery near Čkyně and the restored former synagogue there remain as reminders of the area's Jewish past.

El lugar hoy

The synagogue stood on the corner of today's 1. máje and Johnova streets in Vimperk. After the war a residential house, now numbered 361/3, was built on its plot, and nothing of the synagogue survives above ground. A granite memorial plaque, unveiled in June 2003 and commissioned by the town, is set in the stone retaining wall of the neighbouring building of the Šumava National Park administration, because the owners of the new house did not want it on their building. The pin for this entry marks that neighbouring park administration building, not the exact footprint of the synagogue.

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