[Pages 287-288]

Varpalota

Jewish Population

Until the end of the First World War

The majority of the Jews of Varpalota were merchants and tenants, who rented shops and butcher shops. Some were peddlers of all kinds of agricultural products.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, railroads which connected villages and towns. This made the farmers need the merchandise of the Jews of Varpalota less. Many of the local Jews moved to other cities, but when a coal mine was opened there, the importance of the place grew, and the number of Jews grew with it.

According to local Jewish tradition, the founding of the mine is connected with the halachic answers of the rabbi of Varpalota, Rabbi Abraham Singer. He called on the local authorities to note that there was a spring called Szenhely, which means “a place of coal.” Local attitudes to Jews were usually positive, and they were supported whenever the landlords or their representatives persecuted them.

There was an official document from 1831, which pointed out that the local Jews didn't cause harm to the city, but the opposite. They were useful as renters of apartments, or clever merchants who supplied goods to the place, taking only a small profit, and also as taxpayers. The Jews rewarded their non-Jewish neighbors as well as they could several times. When a plague broke out the Jews established a hospital, which served the whole city, and when the church bells wee injured by fire in 1860, the Jews collected money to restore them.

In 1878 the community defined itself as a status quo community.

It had a Hevra Kadisha, which was established in the first half of the nineteenth century, a Women's Association, and a society for helping poor Jews, established in 1890. It also had a yeshiva and Talmud Torah, established in 1850.

The synagogue was built in the middle of the eighteenth century. When the building became too cramped for everyone to pray in it, a glorious building was built. It was opened in 1840, in the presence of representative of church, district, and municipal authorities, a very rare phenomenon in this era in Hungary. The elementary Jewish school was established about the time of the construction of the first synagogue. In 1786 the school had a building of its own. In 1840 there were two teachers in it, Hungarian and German. In Varpalota there were a few famous scholars-rabbis. Of them we shall mention Rabbi Israel Ben -Yehuda Leib (1782-1808). During his time in office the majority of community institutions were established. He composed the community and burial society regulations, following the rules of the Prague community.

We have mentioned Rabbi Abraham Singer, (1849-1914), who was the rabbi of Varpalota, some dozens of years until his death. Rabbi Singer wrote a history of Hungarian Jewry, and the movement for religious reform in the nineteenth century (1899). His son, Rabbi Yehuda Leib (Leo) Singer followed him as rabbi of Varpalota from 1914. He wrote the history of the community, and translated the Psalms and an abridged version of the Shulchan Aruch into Hungarian, and prose. He was murdered in the Holocaust.

During the White Terror after the First World War, the Jews were not molested l because of good relations between the Jewish and non-Jewish population. This was one of the few places where the Jews were not harmed at all.

The Holocaust

In the middle of May 1944 the Jews of Varpalota were concentrated in a ghetto situated in the old synagogue and its attached buildings. Afterwards they were taken to Sakashpahruer ghetto, and from June 17-21 were sent to Auschwitz. After the war only a few Jews returned to Varpalota, and community life was not renewed.

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Updated 17 Jul 2009 by LA