Votice Synagogue

La comunidad judía

The Encyclopaedia Judaica places the first evidence of Jews in Votice in a document of 1538 concerning their cemetery. In 1570 there were 13 Jewish families, and the Jüdische Gemeinden website gives almost 60 families around 1725. In 1799 the Encyclopaedia counts 50 families. Many were grain merchants, and some leased estates or concessions (arendas) on the surrounding manors; the Jüdische Gemeinden website adds the wool, leather and flax trades and, later, cattle dealing. The Jewish quarter burned in 1661, 1693 and 1724 and was rebuilt each time. From the middle of the nineteenth century most Jewish families belonged to the town's middle class and were integrated into its economic and social life. The census of 1869 recorded 340 Jews in the town and 1,015 in the judicial district; in 1902 the congregation covered 560 Jews living in 12 localities. Migration to the cities then reduced it quickly: 163 Jews lived in the town in 1910 and 348 in the district, and the community had 76 members in 1930.

Arquitectura y diseño

Almost nothing is known about the appearance of the building. The Encyclopaedia Judaica gives only two dates, construction in 1661 and a renovation in 1724, and the other sources read add no description. Both dates coincide with fires that, according to the Jüdische Gemeinden website, destroyed the Jewish quarter, which suggests that the synagogue was rebuilt or repaired after the fires; this is an inference, not a documented fact. No source consulted describes its plan, materials, roof form, interior arrangement or seating capacity, or says exactly where in the town it stood. The architect and builders are unknown. The site records of the Zaniklé obce a objekty project list a page for the Votice synagogue that probably holds photographs, but it could not be read.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

The Encyclopaedia Judaica describes the community as having a lively cultural life and names two outstanding rabbis who served it: Jedidiah Tiah Weil, and Moses Bloch, who was rabbi in Votice from 1847 to 1853. The synagogue was the centre of this religious life, and the Encyclopaedia records that it held ritual equipment valuable enough to be collected by the Jewish Central Museum in Prague during the war, when objects from the closed Bohemian and Moravian congregations were gathered there. The names of later rabbis, cantors, teachers and community officers were not found in the sources consulted, and no account of services, festivals or the building's interior has been read. By the 1930s the congregation of 76 people would have been too small to fill a synagogue built for a community several times its size.

Destrucción

No source read reports damage to the synagogue during the Nazi occupation. After the deportations of 1942 the building stood empty, and its ritual furnishings were taken to the Jewish Central Museum in Prague. No Jewish community was re-established in Votice after the war. The Jüdische Gemeinden website states that the synagogue building was demolished in 1949, and the Encyclopaedia Judaica gives 1949-50; the European Jewish heritage guide gives 1950. These dates fall in the first years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, which began in February 1948. Who ordered or carried out the demolition, and whether the building was first sold by the Jewish community organisation, is not recorded in any source consulted. The European guide's remark that the synagogue was preserved after the war refers to the years immediately after 1945.

El destino de la comunidad

After the Nazi German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939 the Jews of Votice came under the anti-Jewish laws of the Protectorate. Some managed to leave before the occupation, according to the European Jewish heritage guide. The Encyclopaedia Judaica states that in 1942 all the Jews of Votice were deported to extermination camps, and the Jüdische Gemeinden website says the families still living in the town were deported at the end of 1942 by way of the Theresienstadt ghetto to the camps in occupied Poland. The number of victims from Votice and the dates of their transports were not found in the sources read; their names are recorded on the Holocaust memorial at Tábor. No Jewish community was formed again in Votice after 1945, and no survivors who returned to the town are recorded.

El lugar hoy

The exact plot of the synagogue has not been identified in any source read, so it is not possible to say what stands there today. It probably stood in or near the former Jewish quarter of the town, but the street and house number are unknown. The map pin is a placeholder at the centre of Votice and does not mark the building. The Jewish cemetery, first mentioned in 1538 and still holding gravestones from the eighteenth century, survives outside the town and is the main visible trace of the community. The town's own history pages on mesto-votice.cz include chapters on the Jewish community and its end, which probably give the location, but they could not be read in this research.

Nombres destacados