First Synagogue of Vukovar

The Jewish community

Organised Jewish life in Vukovar lasted, in Damjanović's words, little more than a hundred years, from the late 1830s to 1945. The town belonged to the Eltz family's estate, and the local merchants' association had for years campaigned without success against Jewish settlement. Hungarian laws of 1790/91 and 1840 let Jews settle in most towns but did not allow them to build synagogues, which is why the 1845 building was presented to the authorities as a prayer house. The plot was leased for 32 years by Salomon Spitzer, a surgeon who had been the first Jew employed by Srijem county and who had converted to Catholicism by then. The community's reply to the county in August 1845 was signed first by Friedrich Singer (Szinger), with Jacobus Borovitz, Benedictus Tander and Abraham Shmuczer. The community then grew quickly: JewishGen gives about 200 Jews in 1900 and some 600 in 1925/26, and by the end of the century it was among the largest and wealthiest in Croatia. It also kept an old cemetery used from about 1830 and a new one opened in 1850.

Architecture and design

Two versions of the 1845 design survive in the Srijem county file in the Croatian State Archives; both are unsigned, so the designer is unknown. Damjanović suggests the county surveyor Eugen Jeroslavsky drew the second version, and that the first may have come from Vienna or Pest. The front had plain Doric pilasters on a high plinth, a shallow frieze, a central portal and a semicircular thermal window above it. The long side facing Gajeva ulica had three large semicircular windows high in the wall, and its pylon-like massing recalls an Egyptian temple. The first project had no visible roof; the revised one added a hipped roof and a chimney. Three doors led to the men's hall, to a stair for the women's gallery above the entrance, and to a side room. Two more windows flanked the Torah ark on the rear wall. A small dwelling, perhaps for the ritual slaughterer, was attached and was removed in the 1850s. The building stood on a slope, oriented north-west to south-east, on cadastral plot 89. Capacity is unknown.

Life inside the synagogue

Very little is recorded about worship in the building. The congregation was Ashkenazi, and the plan followed Ashkenazi practice: men prayed in the main rectangular hall, entered through a vestibule from the central door, while women used a gallery reached by a separate stair from the right-hand door. The left-hand door opened into a small room that Damjanović identifies as a place for latecomers. The 1845 drawings show no Torah ark, so the ark was probably provisional at first and a more representative one may have been installed later; nothing is known of it. The attached dwelling with a kitchen and living room was reportedly meant for the shochet, the ritual slaughterer, though Damjanović notes it may also have helped the claim that the building was a house rather than a temple. No rabbi, cantor or teacher who served in the building between 1845 and 1889 is named in the sources read. The building was used for worship until the new synagogue opened in 1889.

Destruction

The building survived the Second World War as a Calvinist church, so its end is not part of the Holocaust. After the community moved into its new synagogue in 1889, it decided in 1894 or 1895 to sell the old one to the Hungarian Calvinist congregation, which kept the facade but probably walled up the side doors. In 1910 the firm Banheyer i sin built Funtak's Secession-style concrete bell tower in front of the main facade, with a new choir inside. The Danube flood of 1965 partly undermined the foundations and left the ground unstable, and by then emigration and assimilation had reduced the Calvinist congregation so that the church was rarely used. In 1965 Vukovar was part of Communist Yugoslavia. Damjanović writes that the damage alone did not make the building impossible to save and blames the decision to pull it down on a negative attitude to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century heritage and a radical modernist approach to town planning. He dates the demolition to the end of the 1960s and illustrates it with a photograph of the demolition in the Vukovar City Museum. No source read names the authority that ordered it.

The community’s fate

The congregation that had built the synagogue was destroyed in 1941, after Vukovar became part of the Ustaše-ruled Independent State of Croatia. JewishGen records about 289 Jews in 1937/38 and says that in late 1941 the community of about 500 was deported to various camps, mainly Jasenovac; another note on the same page says Jewish property was confiscated and that few returned. The last rabbi, Dr Izrael (Izidor) Scher, and his wife Klara, a doctor, were murdered at Jasenovac in July 1941 according to the Kraus history and CENDO records cited by Wikipedia. Only 24 Jews were counted in Vukovar in 1947. Alfred Pal, a Vukovar survivor, told the JTA in 2002 that he was the only survivor of his family. The sources read do not give a full death toll. The great synagogue of 1889 was sold and demolished in 1958, and no Jewish community remains in the town; the Jewish cemetery survives.

The site today

The synagogue stood on cadastral plot 89 of the 1863 survey on Gajeva ulica, now Ulica Ljudevita Gaja, a sloping street in Stari Vukovar between the town centre and the Franciscan monastery; the great synagogue of 1889 stood on plot 92 of the same street. Damjanović states only that the church no longer exists and does not describe what occupies the plot today. No surviving fragment of the building or of Funtak's tower is recorded, and no marker on the site was found. The nearby Hungarian school that Funtak also designed now serves as a police station. The map pin marks the midpoint of Ulica Ljudevita Gaja and not the exact plot.

Notable names