Vsetín Synagogue

The Jewish community

Jewish settlement in Vsetín is documented from the second half of the seventeenth century; the town archive's oldest evidence dates from 1669, and Sauerová names a Jew called Hirschel admitted in 1661. Eighteenth-century records name Jewish leaseholders of the town distillery and other traders. In 1823 Count Stephan Illésházy expelled all but one family. After 1848 Jews settled again, among the first the family of Jakob Kohn (born 1791) and his son Josef (1814-1884), who in 1849 founded a factory for bentwood and other wooden products that grew into a firm with branches across Europe. Other Jewish industrialists included the glassmaker Salomon Reich. The community numbered 111 in 1880, 158 in 1890, 165 in 1900, 97 in 1921 and 101 in 1930, about two to three per cent of the town. A Jewish religious society was founded in 1886, and from about 1890 Vsetín was organisationally attached to a neighbouring larger community, Valašské Meziříčí according to Sauerová and Hranice according to the archive inventory. Jüdische Gemeinden reports violent anti-Jewish riots in 1899.

Architecture and design

Few details of the building are recorded. The Jewish religious society bought the house at Štěpánská 388 and the adjoining land in 1895 and built the synagogue there in 1897; whether the older house was rebuilt or replaced is unknown. The only historical photograph found shows the street front: a long, single-storey rendered building raised on a plinth, divided by flat pilasters into bays. Each bay holds a tall round-arched window with a moulded surround, and below the windows are rectangular panels with garland-like ornament. Shallow arched blind panels sit between the windows. A deep cornice runs along the top, and over the centre rises a raised parapet or attic with a small pediment-like crown. A doorway appears at the left edge. The Czech Holocaust memorials database calls the style Neoclassical. The architect, builder, seating capacity, the interior and the position of the women's gallery are unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

Very little is recorded about worship in the Vsetín synagogue. The community was small and had no rabbi of its own in the sources read; from about 1890 it was attached to a neighbouring larger community for religious administration. Sauerová names Leopold Blau as cantor in Vsetín, who also taught religion in the Jewish public schools and served as ritual slaughterer, a combination of offices typical of small Moravian congregations. The Kohn family, the town's leading Jewish industrialists, set up a charitable fund for poor children of any faith, and the members named in the sources include factory owners, a glass manufacturer and lawyers. Services were probably held on Sabbaths and festivals for the roughly one hundred Jews of the town and nearby villages, but no description of the interior, the order of services or the congregation's religious orientation has been found. A 1997 article by a native of the town in the journal Phoenix describes Jewish life in Vsetín before the war and was not read.

Destruction

German troops occupied Bohemia and Moravia on 15 March 1939. On the night of 19 to 20 March 1939 the Vsetín synagogue was set on fire by members of the Schutzpolizei, the Nazi German uniformed police. According to the Czech Holocaust memorials database of the Institute of Art History, the arsonists were a unit led by a Lieutenant Jüngst that had come by bus from the area of Gleiwitz (Gliwice) and Beuthen (Bytom) in Nazi Germany. The inscription on the stone at the site repeats that the synagogue was burned by the German police that night. Jüdische Gemeinden says only that it was burned immediately after the German occupation. The building was gutted. The Vsetín town archive holds a 1939 file on the purchase of the burnt-out synagogue of the Jewish religious community, and the archive's own description says the synagogue was burned and demolished by the Nazis. Who bought the ruin, and the exact date on which its walls were pulled down, are not recorded in the sources read.

The community’s fate

In 1939 the Jewish community of Vsetín had 81 members. Under the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia they were stripped of property: the district office recorded the confiscation of gold, silver and valuables from Jews in 1940. According to Jüdische Gemeinden, the Jews who remained in Vsetín were deported in September 1942 via Ostrava to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and nearly all of them were taken on from there to Maly Trostinec near Minsk and murdered. Only five members of the community returned after the war. Petra Sauerová's study of the region argues that local residents took part in the persecution that killed more than 400 Jews of the Vsetín area. After 1945 a small community formed together with survivors from Valašské Meziříčí, but it lasted only a few years, and by the early 1950s most of its members had emigrated. A list of the Jewish victims of Vsetín and its villages was published in the journal Phoenix in 1997.

The site today

The synagogue stood on Štěpánská Street in the centre of Vsetín, at the former house number 388. Its site is now a grassed area with shrubs and trees beside the modern residential block Štěpánská 1881, and no part of the building survives above ground. A stone memorial with a menorah, unveiled in 1992, marks the place where the synagogue stood. The Jewish cemetery founded in 1888 still exists elsewhere in the town. The map pin is placed at the memorial's recorded coordinates, which mark the site but not the building's exact footprint.

Notable names