Model tribute to a lost city, destroyed by Communists
FOR THE next four months, a startling sight will greet visitors to Bratislava’s picturesque Old Town: an imposing replica of a twin-towered, Moorish-style synagogue standing in the shadow of the city’s cathedral just a few yards from a busy highway overpass.
The tent-like mock-up is a two-thirds scale model of the grandly ornate synagogue built in 1894 that stood on this very spot until the late 1960s, when, less than 15 years after the Shoah, the city’s Communist authorities demolished Bratislava’s entire historic Jewish quarter to build the highway and connecting bridge across the Danube.
The replica is the centrepiece of “The Lost City”, one of two new projects unveiled this week aimed at focusing attention on the centuries-long — but often forgotten — history of Jewish life in the Slovak capital.
Just ahead of the Lost City launch, Bratislava’s Jewish community opened a museum in the women’s gallery of the only synagogue in the city to have survived the Holocaust and Communism.
“Both projects provide injections of the Jewish aspect of the city,” said Bratislava’s Rabbi Baruch Myers.
About 15,000 Jews lived in Bratislava on the eve of the Second World War. Only 600 live in the city today.
The new museum’s displays of Judai- ca, documents, photographs and other artefacts illustrate the history of Jews in the city, before, during and after the Shoah.
Items range from a bottle of locally produced kosher wine to a portrait of the Chatam Sofer, an influential 19thcentury rabbi whose tomb in Bratislava is still a site of pilgrimage. The synagogue itself, a modernist-cubist building inaugurated in 1926, forms the main exhibit.
The exhibition concept reflects the fact that the synagogue is still in use and the only Jewish house of worship in Bratislava, says Maros Borsky, the vice-president of the Bratislava Jewish community and chief curator of the museum.
The Lost City project has a similar goal but a different concept. The brainchild of local Jewish businessman Milos Ziak and sponsored by the Slovak-Israeli Chamber of Commerce, it is a touristic journey through a vanished world, an attempt to foster awareness of what was destroyed.
For the launch, Mr Ziak led a group of Slovak officials, diplomats, businesspeople and Jewish representatives on a walking tour of sites of synagogues, schools, houses — buildings that no longer exist.
We followed a guidebook he’d had published, Demolished Jewish Bratislava, that includes shockingly vivid pictures of the demolition of the synagogue and other Jewish sites in the district.