The Fate of the Slovak Jews

The history of the Jews in the Slovak regions can be documented back as early as the 11th century. Encouraged by the Hungarian aristocracy, Jews migrating to northern Hungary from Moravia, Galicia and Bukovina, and Lower Austria tended to settle near the borders of the states from which they had come, and also managed to maintain religious, communal, and linguistic ties with Jewish communities across the borders.

As Jewish communities began to spread, Bratislava became the seat of Hungarian Jewish Orthodoxy under the leadership of the renowned Rabbi Moshe Schreiber,  who served as rabbi in Bratislava from 1806 until his death. He founded the influential yeshiva of Bratislava. It was Schreiber who taught that Judaism could never change or evolve and coined the phrase, "Anything new is forbidden by the Torah."

In 1867, the dual monarch of Austro-Hungary was established and Slovakia became a part of Hungary . The Hungarian parliament passed the Emancipation Law to promote assimilation among minorities, especially Jews. Government officials supported Jewish cooperation in industry and finance.

The Jewish population grew exponentially, especially in small, secluded towns in Eastern Slovakia. Nevertheless, much anti-Semitism existed in Slovakia and nationalists refused to allow Jews to assimilate into their culture. In 1918 just after World War I Czechoslovakia, with other central European countries regained independence as a result of Versailles treaty. Jews were given the right to be considered a separate nationality in the country.

In 1919, the National Federation of Slovak Jews was established in Piestany and the Jewish Party  Židovská Strana was created. On February, 15th ,1921 the first national census in Czechoslovakia was held, 135,918 people registered as practicing Jews, approximately 4.5 percent of the population,  70,522 of them declared themselves of Jewish nationality.

In 1938 about 135,000 Jews lived in Slovakia, of whom 40,000 lived in the territory ceded to Hungary. Slovakia was poorer and far less industrialized than the historic Czech crown provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, and so were its Jews. They were engaged mostly in retail trade and handicrafts, servicing the peasantry.

On March 15, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia in the rump Czecho-Slovak state, in flagrant violation of the Munich Pact. The German occupation authorities refashioned the two provinces as a German protectorate, annexed directly to the Reich, but under the leadership of a Reich Protector. Konstantin von Neurath, the former German foreign minister, served as Reich Protector from March 1939 until he was replaced by RSHA chief Reinhard Heydrich.

The parliament in Bratislava proclaimed Slovakia independent on 14 March 1939. The next day, German troops occupied the rest of Bohemia and Moravia, declaring it a Protectorate, and Hungary seized the remnants of sub-Carpathian Ruthenia. Little more than 20 years after its creation, Czechoslovakia had ceased to exist.

Read the full article here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/nazioccupation/slovakjews.html

The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team

www.HolocaustReseachProject.org

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