Všeruby Synagogue

הקהילה היהודית

Jewish settlement in Všeruby is documented from 1657. The census of 1722 found six Jewish families, one of them, the family of Abraham Markus, settled there for at least a century; the same six families were counted in 1736, while the estate administration of Kout tried to limit Jewish marriages and settlement and urged the town to favour Christian settlers. By 1837 there were about eleven Jewish households. Between 1836 and 1893 the registers of Všeruby and nearby Trhanov recorded 136 Jewish births, 82 deaths and 21 marriages. The Jews were mainly wholesale traders in feathers, wool, game and geese, and cattle dealers at the fairs of Kdyně; later the merchant Gustav Hoitasch and Mrs Klauberová organised the making of matchboxes in about ten surrounding villages. The dead were buried at first in other towns, from 1842 in Loučim, and later in a small cemetery in the fields north of the village. In the second half of the nineteenth century most families moved to larger towns. In 1930 only four Jewish families remained, and in 1934 fourteen Jews lived in Všeruby.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

No photograph, plan or description of the building was found in any source that could be read. A historical photograph of about 1935 is known from the Czech local-history site kohoutikriz.org, but it could not be opened. The 1934 account by František Houra names the people who built the synagogue: Vilém Klauber, a building engineer from Vienna, who is treated here as its designer; Lemberger, a sculptor of Všeruby; V. Wimmer, a painter from Domažlice; Weber, a carpenter of Všeruby; and Braun, master bricklayer from Schneiderhof. The presence of a sculptor and a painter suggests carved and painted decoration, but its nature is unknown. Bedřich Stadion of Kout gave 5,000 bricks and the farmer Ondřej Riederer of Ploes two cartloads of timber and planks, which indicates a brick building with timber roof and fittings. Houra states that the new synagogue stood on the site of the former prayer house and school. Its size, seating capacity, style and exact address are unknown.

החיים בבית הכנסת

The synagogue was furnished largely through gifts. Sara Fleischlová of Leipzig gave the curtain and cover for the Torah ark, Marie Schwartzkopfová of Sušice another Torah cover, the Pollak family of Prague eight gilded candlesticks and Terezie Thiebenová of Domažlice two more. The opening ceremony was attended by the district chief of Domažlice, the Catholic clergy of Všeruby, Bavarian and Austrian customs and finance officials, the local firemen and villagers from the surrounding area. No rabbi of Všeruby is named in the sources read; the congregation was served by religion teachers who also led worship in a community of this size. Their names are recorded: Abraham Bloch in 1877 and 1888, Ullmann in 1887, Lustick in 1890, Adolf Löwy from 1890 to 1896, Bernard Österreicher from 1897 to 1904 and Bondy in 1907. In 1871 the teacher's salary of 210 guilders was met largely by members such as M. B. Klauber, who gave 40 guilders. By 1934, Houra wrote, the synagogue stood abandoned.

הרס

By 1934, with only fourteen Jews left in the village, the synagogue was no longer in use and stood abandoned, according to the local historian František Houra. No source read describes what happened to it during the Second World War, when it passed into other hands, or how it was used after 1945. The German residents of Všeruby were expelled after the war. The JewishGen Cemetery Discovery Project records that the synagogue was pulled down in 1989, and the German-language community history Jüdische Gemeinden gives the end of the 1980s. Neither says whether the demolition came before or after the fall of the Communist regime in November 1989, and who ordered or carried out the demolition is not recorded in the sources found.

גורל הקהילה

The community had largely dispersed before the Nazi era. In 1930 four families remained: the merchant Gustav Hoitasch, who lived at house no. 7 with three others, the merchant Jindřich Lederer and his family, and the Schwarz and Hutter families, three people each; the JewishGen survey gives 18 Jews in 1930 and Houra 14 in 1934. The fate of these people after 1938 has not been established from the sources read: no deportation list or survivor record for Všeruby was found. The JewishGen Cemetery Discovery Project notes that the last burial of a local resident in the Jewish cemetery took place in 1938, that the cemetery was probably vandalised by Nazis around that time, and that a woman who died on a death march in 1945 was buried there. No Jewish community existed in Všeruby after the war, and the cemetery is now owned by the Jewish community of Plzeň.

האתר כיום

The synagogue's exact plot has not been identified in the sources read, so it is not possible to say what occupies it today; Houra says only that it stood where the old prayer house and school had been. No surviving fragment and no marker on the site is recorded. The map pin for this entry is a placeholder at the centre of the village and should not be read as the synagogue's location. The Jewish cemetery survives about 1 km north of the village, on the land of Kunejovice, on an isolated hillside among fields and woods; it has between 20 and 100 gravestones, the oldest from 1759, many fallen or sunk into the ground.

שמות בולטים