History
Mukachevo better known as Munkacs by the Jewish community that once flourished there, is at the nexus of a region that has changed sovereignty five times within the past one hundred years. The changes are reflected in the various names by which this region, known as Subcarpathian Ruthenia in English, has been called: Carpaten, Podkarpatskaya Rus, Carpatho-Ukraine and Zakarpatskaya Oblast. The region’s administrative center has always been Uzhgorod/Ungvar and its commercial center had been Munkacs. For most of its history the town was called by its Hungarian name, Munkacs. However, maps published at different times have displayed the name as Munkatsch (German) Munkacz (Polish), Mukacevo (Czech) and currently in its Russian now Ukrainian designation, Mukachevo. For a period of eighteen years, from 1920 until November 1938 Subcarpathian Ruthenia was a part of the newly created Czechoslovakia.
Street Maps: Munkacs 1 Munkacs 2 Munkacs 3
If one were to bifurcate the eastern part of Europe into northern and southern hemispheres, arguably, two cities, one in the north and the other in the south could epitomize the different crucibles experienced by Jews during the past century: In the north, Vilna (Vilnius or Wilno in Polish) could represent the epitome of Jewish idealism and Yiddish nationalism while in the south, Munkacs could represent Jewish piety and commercial creativity.
It was a community of paradoxes: the most outspoken voice of religious anti-Zionism was the Rebbe of Munkacs, Rabbi Chaim Elazar Spira (who led the community from 1913 until his death in 1937). He had succeeded his father, Rabbi Zvi Hersh, who had earlier inherited the mantle of leadership from his father Rabbi Shlomo Spira. In this bastion of anti-Zionism, all forms of Zionism flowered. The Hebrew Gymnasium was founded in Munkacs five years after the first Hebrew speaking elementary school in Czechoslovakia was established there in 1920. It soon became the most prestigious Hebrew high school east of Warsaw. Zionist activism along with Chasidic pietism contributed to a community percolating with excitement, intrigue and at times internecine conflict.
There was friction and acrimony between the Munkatsher and Belzer Chassidim that still resonates today in the communities of Brooklyn and Meah Shearim. However, along with the dominant Munkatsher Chasidic community there co-existed smaller yet vibrant Chassidic groups who were followers of the Rebbes of Spinka, Zidichov, and Vishnitz. By the time of the Holocaust there were nearly 30 synagogues in town, many of which were Chasidic shtibelech and Kloyzim. By 1851 Munkacs supported a large Yeshiva, thereby demonstrating the community’s commitment to Jewish learning and piety. Munkatch had several Jewish newspapers including dailies. The papers published in Yiddish, Hungarian and other languages. A Hebrew printing press was founded in 1871, and it soon became one of the most important publishing centers in East Central Europe.
There are documents in the Beregovo (Beregszas) State Archives which indicate that Jews lived in Munkacs and the surrounding villages as early as the second half of the seventeenth century. However, it was nearly one hundred years later in 1741 that a Jewish community of 80 families was organized and a synagogue built. At first the Jewish community grew slowly: 1815 (165), 1830 (202) and by 1842 (301). There is a list of Jews from Munkacs which shows 247 of their number (including the name of my gggrandfather, Izak) serving in the local militia during the Hungarian revolt of 1848 against the Austrians. By 1891 the Jewish community had grown to 5,049 individuals which represented nearly 48% of the total population of Munkacs. In 1941 the Jewish community numbered 13,488 (representing 42.7% of the total population). Their numbers continued to be close to half of the city’s population until the spring of 1944 when there were nearly 15,000 Jewish residents of the town. This ended on May 30, 1944 when the city was pronounced Judenrein (free of Jews after ghettoization and a series of deportations to Auschwitz).
Remarkably, there was still a relatively large number, perhaps upwards of 2000 Jews living in Mukachevo during the 1950s and 1960s. They included a mix of native survivors who returned home, surviving Jews from the surrounding villages who could not find a viable community in their villages and migrated to the nearest urban settings where Jewish life, albeit discouraged by the regime, still continued in a sub Rosa fashion. In addition, Jews along with others, were sent by the central government to “Russify” the heterogeneous ethnic mix of the region. At the first opportunity (starting in 1969) the traditional Jews of Munkacs and Subcarpathian Ruthenia immigrated to Israel or the United States. Today, what remains of the Jewish community of Mukachevo is fewer than 300 Jews including eight Jewish men and less than twenty Jewish women who were born there before World War II; their average age being over eighty. Other Jews still in Mukachevo are a handful remaining from those who had earlier migrated from the villages after surviving the war, and a greater number of Russian Jews who were brought there by the Soviet government. It doesn’t require the skill of a demographer or the prescience of an oracle to predict the imminent collapse of even this vestige of remaining Jewish life in the once proud and glorious city that many had called an Iyr Imahot B’Yisroel (A Mother City in Israel).