Munkacs מונקאטש
The town of the Shapiras in Subcarpathia, where for half a century Jews were nearly half the inhabitants; in 1944 some fifteen thousand were driven into a ghetto, and by 30 May the town was declared free of Jews.
Jews settled in Munkacs from the second half of the seventeenth century; in 1711 the Schoenborns, lords of the town, let them multiply for a tax, in 1741 the community was organised, eighty families and a synagogue, and in 1842 there were three hundred and one families. Then the town became nearly half Jewish: 5,049 people and forty eight percent in 1891, 7,675 in 1910, 11,241 in 1930, of whom eighty eight in a hundred gave their nationality as Jewish.
The community was led by the house of Shapira, which stands in this reference with its own chain. Rabbi Chaim Elazar, the Minchat Elazar, rabbi from 1913 to 1937, was the chief opponent of Zionism among Hasidic teachers. In that same town a Hebrew elementary school worked from 1920 and a Hebrew secondary school from 1925; by the 1940s Munkacs had some thirty synagogues, most of them Hasidic prayer houses, and four Yiddish newspapers.
After the Germans came in March 1944 some fifteen thousand Jews were driven into a ghetto; the transports to Auschwitz began in mid May, and on 30 May the town was declared free of Jews. About two and a half thousand returned after the war; most in time left for Israel and the West.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- Population censuses: 1891, 1910 and 1930 — the size of the community by year
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the years, the numbers and the circumstances
Basis: documents and evidence.