Zalaszentgrót Synagogue

הקהילה היהודית

The lexicon of 1929 dated the community to about 1670 and added that it may have existed earlier without formal organisation, because the cemetery was said to hold gravestones more than 300 years old. The founders were not known. The earliest officers on record are those named in the Batthyány deed of 1809: Salomon Politzer, the community's judge, and the jurors Salomon Steiner, Jakob Reich, Benedek Kraus, Leopold Tritscher, Isak Singer, Isak Hamburger, Moises Schreiber, Jakob Schirer and Gezel Leeb. Gazda's gazetteer records 400 Jews in 1851, 250 in 1910 and 155 in 1941. A local-history lecture reported in 2017 said that Jews were most numerous between 1870 and 1890, at nearly 15 per cent of the inhabitants, and 6 per cent in 1941. The lexicon counted 315 Jews in 113 families, with 127 taxpayers: 43 merchants, ten craftsmen, ten farmers, five mill owners, three manufacturers, three doctors, two engineers, a lawyer and a large landowner among them. The Jews of 26 surrounding villages, including Türje, Zalabér, Batyk, Pakod and Kehida, belonged to its registry district. Members ran steam mills at Tüskeszentpéter, Zalabér and Batyk and farmed large holdings at Türje and Zalabér.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

No photograph, drawing or plan of the synagogue was found, and a Zala textile artist who depicted the county's synagogues reported in 2010 that no authentic photograph of this one could be traced. What is known comes from written sources. The Magyar Zsidó Lexikon says the structure began as a fortification in the Ottoman period, was turned into a granary once the Ottomans had left, and was fitted out as a synagogue about 1761. Count Batthyány's deed of 1 January 1809 records the community's complaint that the roof truss of the 'Synagog oder Tempel' in the market town threatened to collapse and that the building had become too small for the grown number of Jews. The count sold them the building, though not the ground beneath it, for 2,000 gulden so that they could arrange, repair and enlarge it in their own manner, and promised any land needed for an extension free of charge. Gazda dates the enlargement to 1796-1809. The building's dimensions, materials, style and seating, the form of its ark and women's gallery, and the names of those who built and enlarged it are all unknown.

החיים בבית הכנסת

The congregation belonged to the Congress (Neolog) organisation and was the seat of a district rabbi; Adolf Hirtenstein held the post in 1929. The deed of 1809 shows what the community paid its landlord for: in return for 100 gulden a year it kept the right to sell kosher wine freely, to have its 'Schabes-Stangen' (Sabbath poles), and to be quit of a customary due the deed calls the 'Schild-Kroten' tax. The Chevra Kadisha burial society was thought to be as old as the community, and there was an old women's society. The community school was teaching in Hungarian by the early 1880s and closed in 1899, when the village's schools were nationalised. In 1860 Emperor Franz Joseph sent the community an embossed silver plaque in recognition of its patriotic services. Twenty-five members served in the First World War and fifteen were killed. The community spent 4,365 pengő on religious life in 1928. In 2021 a safe dug up in the yard of a house in the town was found to hold a Torah pointer, a Torah crown, a pair of finials and a Torah shield, which museum staff think may be the synagogue's ornaments.

הרס

The synagogue was standing in 1929, when the Magyar Zsidó Lexikon described it as still existing, and the community was active in 1936, when its president gave an engraving to the Jewish Museum in Budapest. No source read for this entry describes the building during or after 1944. Ritual silver that may have belonged to it was buried in a yard in the town, probably during the deportations of 1944. In 1955 István Löwinger and Kornél Schmelzer surveyed the former synagogues of 24 places in southern and central Transdanubia for Sándor Scheiber, director of the National Rabbinical Seminary. According to a 2010 newspaper account of their report, Zalaszentgrót was one of eight places where the synagogue had already been made to disappear by the middle of the 1950s. Anikó Gazda's survey of 1980-87 likewise records it as demolished. Whether the building was damaged or looted in 1944-45, whether it was sold, and whether it came down before or after the Communist takeover are unknown; nobody is named as responsible. The deed of 1809 had stipulated that the ground would revert to the Batthyány estate if the building ever ceased to be used as a synagogue.

גורל הקהילה

Gazda's gazetteer gives 155 Jews in Zalaszentgrót in 1941, about 6 per cent of the inhabitants according to a lecture reported in 2017. After the Nazi German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 the Jews of Zala county were confined in ghettos. Pinkas Hakehillot states that the Zalaegerszeg ghetto, set up in May 1944 in two streets of that town's Gypsy quarter, also received Jews from Zalaszentgrót, Zalabér, Türje, Keszthely, Tapolca, Sümeg and Lenti. On 4 July 1944, according to the same source, they were loaded into sealed freight cars, 70 to 80 people to a car, without food or water, and taken to Auschwitz; it estimates about 1,200 people in the transport. A microfilm collection of wartime Hungarian documents includes a list of the Jews of Szentgrót drawn up in 1943-44. How many of the town's Jews were murdered, how many returned in 1945 and whether a congregation was formed again are unknown from the sources read. The synagogue had gone by 1955. The Jewish cemetery survives.

האתר כיום

The plot on which the synagogue stood has not been identified in any source read for this entry, so what occupies it today cannot be stated. The lexicon's tradition that the building began as a fortification may point to the neighbourhood of the Batthyány mansion, which the town's website says stands on the site of the former castle, but that is an inference and not a documented location. The map pin is therefore a placeholder at the centre of Zalaszentgrót and should not be read as the synagogue's position. No remains of the building and no marker on its site are recorded. The Jewish cemetery still exists and holds a memorial to the Jews killed in the Second World War. The ritual objects found in 2021 were reported to the Göcseji Museum in Zalaegerszeg.

שמות בולטים