Old Synagogue of Vinkovci

The Jewish community

Jews are recorded in Vinkovci only from the second half of the nineteenth century. The Encyclopaedia Judaica names Ignatz Gross, who opened a shop in 1866, and Jacob Schlesinger, who installed a flour mill in 1870, the year it gives for the formation of the kehillah; Damjanović, after the 1937 local press, gives 1873. Jewish residents worked as tanners, tailors and merchants. JewishGen's Cemetery Discovery Project gives 272 Jews in 1880, the year the synagogue was built, and a Jewish cemetery laid out in 1870 beside those of other faiths. The first rabbi was Solomon Neumann, followed by a Rabbi Schoenfeld and, from 1914, Dr Mavro Frankfurter, who came from Daruvar. Around 1920 the community had about 200 members, 150 of them in the town and some 50 in surrounding villages. During the First World War local Jews were attacked and robbed by deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army and organised their own defence. Lay leaders named by the Encyclopaedia Judaica include L. Stein, Dr Armin Lederer and Dr Ignatz Lang.

Architecture and design

Damjanović describes the building from a single postcard detail, first published in his 2004 article from the catalogue of the Budapest auction house Profil HU (May 2003). It belonged to the synagogue-house type, of which he counts about ten in Croatia, and was not noticeably larger than the houses beside it. The postcard shows only the longer façade, on which the two levels of the interior could be read: a lower row of rectangular windows lit the men's hall, and an upper row of oval windows lit the women's gallery. The wall was articulated by simple pilasters under a heavy cornice, with plain window sills, and a stone tablet bearing a Star of David crowned the main façade. The main façade itself is not known from any image. Damjanović places the design in the Baroque-Classicist manner that dominated sacral building in Slavonia until the early 1880s and thinks it was probably the work of a local engineer; his searches of the Military Frontier administration, the Land Government files and the local press found no record of who built it. A rabbi's residence stood in front of the synagogue until mid-1928. Capacity and interior fittings are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

Very little is recorded about worship in the old building. For more than four decades, from 1880 until the new temple opened in December 1923, it was the community's only synagogue, so the first rabbis of Vinkovci, Solomon Neumann and his successor Rabbi Schoenfeld, served in it, as did Mavro Frankfurter in his first nine years in the town after arriving from Daruvar in 1914. The rabbi lived in a house standing directly in front of the synagogue. The upper oval windows indicate a women's gallery above the men's hall, the usual arrangement in Central European synagogues of the period. Whether the congregation followed a Neolog or Orthodox rite in the old building, who its cantors were, and how many seats it had are not stated in any source read. The community's growth and prosperity were what made the small building unsuitable: from 1911 its leaders were raising money for a larger temple, and a preparatory building committee was formed in 1914 under R. Gross as president, with Dr A. Bresslauer, J. Reich, M. Augenfeld, J. Dežma, G. Herzog, J. Pick and L. Stein.

Destruction

The old synagogue was not destroyed in war. It survived the opening of the new temple in 1923 by several years. At its regular general assembly, reported in the local weekly Vinkovački tjednik (no. 24, 1928), the Israelite religious community decided in June 1928 that the old temple would later be demolished and the house next to it adapted for housing. The report spoke of the building with evident affection as a silent yet eloquent witness to the community's development over decades. In mid-1928 the old rabbi's house that stood in front of it was also removed. A 1937 article in Hrvatski branik states that the old synagogue had been demolished ten years earlier, so Damjanović concludes that it was pulled down soon after the 1928 assembly. The demolition was therefore the community's own decision, taken because the building had been superseded, not an act of persecution. The exact date and the contractor who carried it out are not recorded.

The community’s fate

The Vinkovci community reached about 1,000 Jews in 1931, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, and had fallen to about 630 by 1941 through emigration, mostly to Zagreb. After the Independent State of Croatia was set up in April 1941 the Ustaše persecuted them systematically. Rajka Bućin's 2021 study records young Jewish communists taken to Lepoglava, deaths at Jadovno and on Pag in the summer of 1941, and about 60 young men sent to Jasenovac on 7 November 1941, most of whom were killed soon after arrival. In May 1942, under the Ustaša district head Ivan Tolj, mass arrests followed on 3 and 4 May; the prisoners were held in the Hrvatski Sokol building, and a decision of the Ustaša Supervisory Service of 21 May sent about 358 people to Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška, where most were killed. Children left behind were largely caught up in the August 1942 deportations. Rabbi Mavro Frankfurter was tortured by the Ustaše and died in Jasenovac, as did the community president Ignjat Lang. A few people survived in hiding or through mixed marriages.

The site today

No source read describes what stands today on the corner where the old synagogue was. The historic street names given by Damjanović, Relković street and Frankopanska street, do not both appear in present-day Vinkovci: there is an Ulica Matije Antuna Reljkovića in the town centre, but the only modern Frankopan street (Ulica Frana Krste Frankopana) lies about half a kilometre further east and does not meet it, so at least one street has been renamed or renumbered since the 1920s. The map pin is therefore only the midpoint of the present Reljkovića street and should not be read as the plot. No surviving fragment or marker of the 1880 building is recorded. Locating the site will need an interwar cadastral plan of Vinkovci, such as the one Šalić published in 2002.

Notable names