Palárikovo part 1: Palárikovo and its Jewish Community
- Mattan Segev-Frank
- Mar 25
- 11 min read
Updated: Apr 5
The first of a series of posts about Palárikovo, a Slovak village that had a Jewish community that at its peak reached 90 people only, and is not properly documented in Jewish museums around the world.
Slovakia is a special country. Its scenery and nature are beautiful, and its charm is in its simplicity. Even today, despite modernization, between the larger cities (which are usually tiny compared to large cities in other countries and feel as if they have been frozen in time), narrow, two-lane roads pass through chains of small, agricultural villages. In my many visits, I realized that visiting the same place in different seasons can look completely different and invoke completely different emotions.
The inspiration for this post comes from a discussion that my friend Lucia found in the Slovak Facebook group “Zabudnuté kaštiele, zámky, hrady” (mansions, palaces and forgotten castles). On August 22, 2022, a group member posted a post titled “Palárikovo or Slovenský Meder - a journey through time...” with a collection of historical photographs from the village.
One of the pictures is a postcard from 1918 showing Fülop Reisz's house and shop:
It seems that the author of the pst took the photo from the website "Darabanth Aucióház", which auctioned the original postcard, and colorized it with some AI.
In the reactions to the photo, a discussion developed between residents of Palárikovo who raised nostalgic stories about those who lived in the house in the 1980s and 1970s, and from time to time the question was asked, “But who lived there originally? What's the story of this house?”
One commenter, Ms. Magdaléna Smolinska Šutkova, wrote: "I think I know. Around 1950, Mr. Frank lived there with his wife, after their return from the concentration camps. We visited them with my mother. Allegedly, the house and the store belonged to them before World War II. Mr. Frank was a Firewood merchant, and after his wife's death he emigrated to Palestine alone. Afterwards, the Skokanová family moved to the back of the building."
The discussion about this picture made me realize that there are people outside of our family, who may be interested in this story that no one was left to tell them, and inspired me to write about the history of the house in particular, of the tiny Jewish community of Palárikovo, and my family’s part within this fabric. To be honest, my friend Mr. Imrich Szabo has been encouraging me for the last year to start writing about the history of the Jews of Palárikovo, but I needed the spark to ignite my inspiration, and this post gave me exactly that.
Out of consideration to the readers, I’ll devide the story to several parts:
Part 1: “Palárikovo and its Jewish Community” will give background to anyone who isn’t familiar with this small village and it’s Jewish population.
Part 2: “The House on Štefánikova Street” will tell the stories of the people who lived in the house from 1891 till 1960.
Part 3: “Palárikovo and My Family” will tell the story of my ancestors and relatives in the village. If it’ll get too long – perhaps it’ll be devided to two parts.
Palárikovo and its Jewish Community
This section is based mostly on an article by Palárikovo's village chronicler Mgr. Karol Kolčáni, published in “Naše Noviny”, the bi-monthly journal of the Municipality of Palárikovo on November 6, 2008, titled “The Jewish Community of Slovenský Meder”, with my own additions.
Let's start with some background. Like many other settlements in modern Slovakia, this small village has changed ownership several times during modern times. The borders around it have changed several times, as have the languages in which the population in it spoke. Even the name of the village changed repeatedly: Until World War I, the area belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary and the village was called Tótmegyer after its original inhabitants (Tót = Slovak in the Hungarian language, Megyer = the Magyar tribes that conquered Hungary hundreds of years back). After World War I, Czechoslovakia was established as a new state. Following the move of Hungary's borders to the south, the village was included in Czechoslovakia, and in 1920 it was given a new name: Slovenský Meder, a literal translation of the Hungarian name.
As is well known, Hungary did not accept the loss of the territories that were split from it after the loss in World War I, and began to demand that territories would be returned to it. Following the Munich Agreement of 1938, in which Czechoslovakia did not take part, the country's borders were moved again, with Germany annexing the Sudetenland and later occupying the entire Czech part, and Poland and Hungary also annexing parts of the country. The remaining territory became a semi-autonomous puppet state under the Nazi regime.
After the war, the Czechoslovak Republic was re-established, and from 1948 the village was renamed Palárikovo, after the Slovak playwright, priest, writer and journalist Jan Palárik. This name survived the Velvet Revolution (the split of Czechoslovakia to the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1989), and the village is still called that way to this day as part of Slovakia.
The village is home to the hunting castle of the Graf Karolyi family, one of the oldest, richest, and most famous aristocratic families in Hungary. The surrounding lands and houses were mostly owned by the Graf, and as in most parts of the kingdom, Jews originally were forbidden to settle there.
Around 1798, Jews arrived in the village for the first time, with the approval of the Graf Jozef Karolyi [1768-1803]. In 1800, there were 21 Jews in the village. In the census of 1828, however, only one Jew was mentioned in the village: Mar(kus) Wilheim.
By 1860, a number of Jewish families had settled in the village, who were scattered among the houses of the village and did not live in a concentrated cluster. There was no Jewish school, so the Jewish children studied together with the Christian children.
The Jews of Palárikovo officially belonged to the Jewish community of Šurany, one of the oldest in Slovakia, where Jews were already living at the beginning of the 16th century. In 1686, the local Jews organized themselves into a community, which also included the Jews of Mojmírovce, Nové Zámky, Tvrdošovce, Komjatice, Palárikovo, Mlynský Sek, Michal nad Žitavou and other small villages. In the mid-19th century, following the abolition of restrictions on Jewish settlement in Hungary, many Jews from Šurany moved to the nearby city of Nové Zámky and established another community. The Jews of Palárikovo switched from Šurany to Nové Zámky which is physically closer.
However, the Jews of Palárikovo maintained their own communal life. Until 1860, Jews used came to pray at the home of Ignatz (Isaac) Reisz (father of Fülop Reisz), but as the community expanded, there was a need for additional infrastructures necessary for the maintenance of a religious Jewish community – a synagogue, a “Cheder” (room for Torah study), a shochet (a ritual butcher who observes kosher regulations) and a “Chevra Kadisha” (burial society). In addition, until 1900, the Jews paid the Graf for permission to maintain a Jewish cemetery on his land (whose ownership was transferred to them), as well as for protection. Later, another cemetery was inaugurated in the village.
In 1860, an Orthodox synagogue and a "Cheder" were built in Palárikovo, between the old Catholic cemetery and an area of the city called Vršek. Before construction began, Mr. Ignatz (Yitzhak) Reisz and Mr. Bernhard (Issachar Dov) Frankl, together with the head of the village, Tomáš Olväcký, traveled to inspect the synagogues in Nové Zámky, Šurany, Šaštín- Stráže, and Stupava. The design of the synagogue was very modest, with wooden furniture ordered from local carpenters in the village. Above the entrance were placed the Tablets of the ten comandments, and on the interior walls were Jewish motifs painted with a stencil, and a large Star of David in the center.
According to Oral History collected by Mr. Kolečany, quoting Hermina Reisz, the synagogue was designed by the famous Jewish architect Ignatz Feigler, who did it to return the favor to a distant relative from the village who supported him financially during his studies.
At the 1869 census, there were already 52 Jews living in the village, from the following families: Adler, Alt, Dekner, Engel, Frankl, Grun, Gerstl, Kleiner, Lowy, Neubrunn, Neufeld, Neumann, Reisz, and Schmeltz. The families came to the village mainly from the towns of Čabaj, Pastuchov, Salgo, Šurani, Vag-Vecse and Sered. Later on, the community grew, mainly due to the marriage of the village girls with families from other places, and the Berger, Ehrenwirth, Feder, Frank, Fuchs, Glenda, Grünhut, Gutman Hermann, Holdenstein, Neumann, Reich, Rosenthal, Schwartz, Schweitzer, Schulz, Sidon, Stern, Szanto, and Weiss families joined the community. At its peak, the tiny Jewish community of Palárikovo consisted of only 90 members, according to the 1930 census.
Among the factors that kept the Jewish community in Palárikovo so small, were the urbanization process that took place in Europe during the 19th century the turn of the 20th century, and the trend of immigrating west to the land of unlimited opportunities - America. A few of the Jews of Palárikovo immigrated to the United States, including 5 siblings from the Alt family.
The head of the Jewish community in Palárikovo was always a member of the Reisz family. The emissary, Shamash and Gabbai of the community was always from the Frankl family. The last Shohet in the community was Bernhard Landstein.
The world wars, of course, did not spare the Jews of Palárikovo. Many of the young men of the community served in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. Among them, I personally know of:
The first name on the village's monument for its fallen soldiers from WW1 is that of Martin Alt, b. 22 February 1890 who had fallen on 31 January 1917.
His cousin František Frank, b. 09 June 1898, was wounded on 30 October 1917 as a One-year volunteer, private, titular corporal, Infantry Regiment 12 m and, survived the war but suffered from PTSD.
His brother Viliam Frank, b. 17 April 1895, was also shell shocked.
An uncle of the previous three, Dr. Samuel Alt, b. 24 June 1876, moved to Budapest for his studies, got married and had three children. In WW1 he served on the Italian front. He was wounded during the bloody battles of Monte San Michele, and died there a month later on 1 August 1916.
Leopold Grünhut, b. 15 June 1874 in Horné Orešany in the Trnava region and moved to Palárikovo following his marriage to the local Rozalia neé Stern. During WW1 he served in the 31st Veszprém Honvéd Infantry Regiment, 31st Batallion, 2nd company.
Bernát Stern, Leopold's brother-in-law, b. 31 July 1885, was featured in the publication "Gallery of Heros" (Hösök galériája) after dying on the Russian battlefield in Bozsa-Vola.
As in the rest of Europe, the patriotism and heroism of the Jewish soldiers during World War I did not help them when World War II broke out. All of the Jews of Palárikovo who hadn’t fled abroad or hid in advance were caught and transferred to the ghettos in Šurany or Nové Zámky, from where they were deported in 1944 on cattle trains towards concentration and extermination camps. Most of the community was exterminated.
One Rotten Pear
Even if in most cases the relations between the Jewish residents and their Christian neighbors in Palárikovo were warm and close – a post about Palárikovo and its connection with the local Jewish community would not be complete and honest if I omit the name of the village’s most infamous figure, who greatly influenced Slovakia’s conduct during World War II.
In 1902, Alexander (Šaňo) Mach was born in the village. He studied to become a priest in Trnava but later became one of the leaders of the fascist regime in independent Slovakia. Mach was the Commander of the Hlinka Guard, head of the secret police and head of the propaganda office. On 28 July 1940, he participated in a meeting with President Josef Tiso and Prime Minister Vojtech Tuka, and Adolf Hitler in Salzburg, in which they decided to establish a new pro-nazi government in Slovakia and Mach was appointed as Minister of Interior.
For most of the years of the Slovak state's existence, Mach and Tuka headed an extremist wing of the Hlinka's Slovak People's Party. In September 1941, Mach supported the deportation of approximately 10,000 Jews from Bratislava to Šariš, Zemplin in East Slovakia.
In Yad Vashem's survivor interview of Magda Zinsenheim neé Sessler, who’s mother was Olga Sessler neé Grün from Palarikovo, she tells that her mother was a classmate of Mach in school in Palarikovo. When the laws against Jews were passing, Olga decided to go talk with her former classmate and convince him to stop the prosecution of Jews. Olga and her husband went to Bratislava to Mach’s house, knocked on the door, and told his wife who she was and that she wants to speak with him. Mrs. Mach let them in, called her husband and asked him to come home because Grünova who went to school with him is waiting. She was a polite host, offering them drinks and food, and kept calling her husband, but he refused to come home and after four hours of waiting they eventually left without speaking with him.
When the deportations of the Jews started, Mach declared on the radio that “deporting the Jews for labor” will solve “the Jewish Problem” in a “Christian way". On 7 February 1943, he announced his plans to resume the deportations, but this plan didn’t progress, due to the political changes (It was becoming clear that Germany will lose the war, so the Slovak representatives started to be cautious), the Vatican and thee Red Cross´s intervenes, and because of the efforts of the Slovak “working group” and resistance group.
Mach was a minister in the government of the independent Slovak state until Septmember 1944, after the Germans suppressed the Uprising and took control of the country.
After the war, Mach fled Slovakia to Vienna, got captured and put on trial, and was sent to prison in Bratislava for 30 years.
The people of Palárikovo were ashamed of their association with Mach. Part of the reason the village changed its name from Slovensky Meder was to dissociate themselves from him.
He has no memorial, nor a street named after him, because the people from Palárikovo opposed such propositions.
Epilogue
After the end of the war, very few Jews returned to the village, among them Arnold (Abraham) Frank and his wife Terezia (Reizel) Frank (née Neuhausz), Emma (Chava) Grünhut and her brother László (Avraham) Grünhut, Joseph Eliezer Schultz and Elisabet Schultz née Frankl, and Terezia Frankl. The synagogue was left deserted.
As for Emma Greenhut – in 1946 she married Bernhard (Baruch) Goldstein in Bratislava. They had a daughter in Bratislava in 1947 and then immigrated to Israel. Emma took whatever documentation she could of the community with her, and her daughter allowed me to scan most of the attached photographs.
László (Avraham) Grünhut immigrated to Israel, then under the control of the British Mandate Palestine, on an illegal immigrant ship named "Jerusalem Under Siege", was arrested and transferred to a refugee camp in Cyprus, but later managed to reach Israel.
In 1947, the plot of land containing the synagogue and the adjacent shochet's house were sold to the Tomšik family, with an explicit condition that the synagogue would be demolished. The Tablets of the Ten Commandments were transferred to the synagogue in the city of Nitra, and some of the surviving Torah scrolls were allegedly transferred to Bratislava.
The last two Jews to live in Palárikovo were my great grandparents, Arnold (Abraham) Frank and Terezia Frank (née Neuhausz). They lived there until 1959. In 1959, Terezia passed away. After her death, Arnold arranged for her to be buried in the Neolog Cemetery in Bratislava, where it would be easier for descendants to come and visit, if they ever will. In October 1960, he boarded a plane in Prague and immigrated to Israel, thus closing the book on the Jewish community of Palárikovo.
Descendants of the Frank, Alt, Frankl, Grün, Grünhut, Stern, and Weiss families now live in Israel and various other places around the world.
And the good people of Palárikovo - most of them have no memory anymore of the people that lived next door to their parents, grandparents or great grandparents, and as we saw in the beginning of this post - are sometimes curious what’s the story with these houses that still stand as a monument to a different era.
To the ones who do remember, like Mr. Szabó and Ms. Smolinská Šutková - I would like to thank you for keeping the memory of my ancestors alive. 💖
This post is already very long, but in the next one I’ll tell the stories of the house on Štefanikova street.
Mattan Segev-Frank
Dear readers,
Please feel free to comment, ask questions or share with me the stories about the Jews your family once knew in this area.
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