Uzhhorod Synagogue (Transcarpathian Regional Philharmonic)

A lyre sits on the roof of the Transcarpathian Regional Philharmonic, bolted there in the 1950s in the place where the Tablets of the Law had stood since 1904. That substitution is the shortest account of what happened to this building.

The facade gives away the rest: a base of pink marble, walls of red ceramic tile and figured clinker brick, turrets and arcaded lines that belong to no concert hall ever designed. This was the choral synagogue of Uzhhorod’s Orthodox Jewish community, on the left bank of the Uzh almost opposite the castle hill.

The community that paid for it

Jews had lived in Uzhhorod since at least the 16th century. At the 1930 census 7,357 of them made up about a third of the town — Orthodox Ashkenazim alongside Hasidic families, with prayer houses and schools through the centre. The community’s first synagogue, a wooden building of 1794, was lost to fire in the early 1900s.

Its replacement was a statement. The work came to some 200,000 crowns, raised from the community’s own merchants and benefactors; local accounts still translate the sum into kilograms of gold. They were not building a prayer room, and they put it where the whole town would see it.

Moorish Revival on the riverbank

The commission went to the Hungarian architects Gyula Papp and Ferenc Szabolcs, with Adolf Hadinger on the engineering, and the style was the Moorish Revival then fashionable across Central Europe, cut with Byzantine motifs. The Tablets of the Law crowned the roof; a Star of David marked the central balcony.

The engineering matched the ornament. The riverbank is soft, so the foundations went down onto driven piles, and the synagogue is reckoned the first building in Uzhhorod to use reinforced concrete. It had central heating, electric light, running water and drainage — uncommon in a Hungarian county town in 1904. The prayer hall held about 900, with galleries for women reached by their own entrances from the river side.

The finishing went to name craftsmen: stained glass by the Budapest master Miksa Róth, interiors painted by Géza Fényi, mosaics attributed to Péter Meloccó, and a translucent mosaic dome overhead. The opening itself was deliberately quiet. On the evening of 27 July 1904 the Torah scrolls were carried over from the old prayer house, and the first service was said.

1944

Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, and the machinery moved fast. Over Passover that April, Uzhhorod’s Jews were ordered from their homes into a ghetto improvised in the Moskovits brickyard on Minai Street. Between 17 and 31 May, five transports carried them to Auschwitz. The synagogue was used as an assembly point along the way. Around 85,000 Jews of Transcarpathia were murdered; the figure is recorded on a memorial plaque on the wall of the building.

For the rest of the war the occupying forces kept horses and stores in the hall. The few who came back afterwards found the walls standing — cracked, stripped, water in the foundations — and the community that had filled them gone.

How a synagogue became a concert hall

In 1947 the Soviet authorities transferred the building to the Ministry of Culture, to be fitted out for the regional philharmonic and the Transcarpathian Folk Choir. Survivors who had returned tried to stop it, blocking the workmen; by one account they held the job up for weeks. The decision stood.

The conversion took about a decade and rewrote the building. The Tablets came off the roof and the lyre went up. The balcony carrying the Star of David was bricked in, leaving a small round window. The Moorish roofline was stripped and the mosaic dome sealed under sheet metal. Inside, the prayer hall was cut horizontally into two floors, with stairs and offices where the Torah ark had stood, and the women’s galleries taken out. The original acoustics did not survive the surgery. The philharmonic, founded on paper in February 1946, opened here in 1957.

The organ, and getting inside

What draws most first-time visitors arrived in 1974: a Rieger-Kloss organ from Czechoslovakia, three manuals and about 2,250 pipes, brought in from the Baltic republics and overhauled in Prague before installation. It is still the largest in Transcarpathia, and the hall, for all that was done to it, still counts among the better rooms in the country. Gilels, Richter, Oistrakh and Rostropovich all played in it.

It remains a working house: symphony, chamber and wind orchestras, the folk choir, and ensembles that draw on the region’s mixed inheritance — Hungarian Melodies, Carpathian Patterns. The organ festival named for Nataliya Vysich, the philharmonic’s long-serving organist, has opened the autumn season since 2008.

The address is pl. Teatralna 10, minutes on foot from the pedestrian centre and the embankment. A concert is the reliable way in; daytime access outside performances comes and goes, so check the philharmonic’s own site first. Stand back on the square and read the facade — the lyre, the blank panel where the star was, the pink stone and coloured tile under everything the twentieth century did to it.