Prekmurje

Prekmurje: the heartland of Jewish life in Slovenia

The Jewish community of Prekmurje took on a permanent form during the eighteenth century in a region closely connected to the Hungarian world through its administration, economy, and culture. This connection explains why Jewish life developed here differently from the central Slovenian lands under Austrian rule, where permanent Jewish settlement remained restricted long after the medieval expulsions. Jewish families settled in the wider Murska Sobota area as early as the first half of the eighteenth century, and records from Zala County mention their presence in 1725, 1736, 1746, and 1798.

During the nineteenth century, Prekmurje became the largest and most vibrant center of Jewish life in the territory of present-day Slovenia. Communities flourished in market towns and along trade routes, where Jews were active as merchants, craftsmen, innkeepers, printers, bankers, and intermediaries between the rural and urban economies. In 1853, Murska Sobota counted 180 Jewish residents and Dolnja Lendava 120; by around 1880, the Jewish population of Prekmurje had grown to more than one thousand.

Lendava, Murska Sobota, and Beltinci emerged as the principal centers of Jewish religious and communal life. In 1852, Murska Sobota became the seat of an independent rabbinate serving six settlements: Murska Sobota, Andrejci, Bodonci, Cankova, Ivanovci, and Tešanovci. A synagogue was built in Beltinci in 1860, and on 21 March 1890 the Jewish community of Murska Sobota was officially established.

Murska Sobota was home to three synagogues. The last, completed in 1907–1908 to the designs of the renowned architect Lipót Baumhorn, reflected the confidence and prosperity of the community as well as its integration into the region's economic life. Its spacious prayer hall, women's gallery, rich interior decoration, and organ made it one of the most impressive Jewish buildings in the area. Dedicated on 31 August 1908, it stood for less than half a century before being demolished in 1954.

The community maintained a rich network of religious, educational, and charitable institutions. A Jewish school with German as the language of instruction operated in Murska Sobota from 1887, while the Jewish Women's Association (1882), the Chevra Kadisha burial society (1883), and the Jewish Youth Association (1892) fostered communal life and mutual support. Many Jewish families lived along today's Slovenska Street, the town's main commercial thoroughfare, where they owned shops, a printing house, a pharmacy, and a tavern.

Jewish residents also played a significant role in the spread of literacy and culture. The Balkányi family offers a notable example: Ernő (Ernest) Balkányi Jr. operated a stationery shop and printing press in Lendava, with a branch in Murska Sobota, at a time when these were among the very few printing houses in Prekmurje. A nineteenth-century Torah scroll from the Murska Sobota synagogue has also survived—a parchment manuscript measuring 725 centimeters in length—one of the most precious surviving witnesses to a once-thriving community.

According to the 1937 census, 820 residents of the Jewish faith lived in the Drava Banovina, with Prekmurje—especially Murska Sobota and Lendava—remaining the heart of Jewish life in Slovenia. From 1929 onward, the Jewish community of Murska Sobota served as the central congregation for most Jews in Slovenian territory, with the exception of Dolnja Lendava, Čakovec, and Prelog. Yet the community was already shrinking: the Hungarian census of 1941 recorded only 438 people of Jewish origin or faith in Prekmurje.

The last rabbi of Murska Sobota was Dr. Lazar Roth, a Slovak who arrived in the town in 1926. Living in the rabbi's house behind the synagogue, he was renowned as an outstanding orator, philosopher, and polyglot, preaching in five languages and speaking ten. His fate came to symbolize the destruction of the community he served. On 26 April 1944, together with the other Jews of Murska Sobota, he was forced into the synagogue before being deported through Čakovec and Nagykanizsa to Auschwitz.

The history of Jewish Prekmurje reached its tragic end in the spring of 1944. Following the German occupation of Hungary, the occupying authorities assembled the Jewish population of Murska Sobota, Lendava, and the surrounding villages in the synagogues on 26 and 27 April. From there they were deported to concentration camps, primarily Auschwitz, where the overwhelming majority were murdered before the end of May.

After the Holocaust, the Jewish community of Prekmurje was never reestablished. Yet Prekmurje remains the heartland of Jewish history in Slovenia: the place where Jewish communal life was largest, best organized, and most deeply woven into local society—and where its destruction during the Holocaust was most systematic and complete.

Lendava – the Jewish shtetl of Prekmurje

The history of Lendava’s Jews is not a marginal chapter in the town’s past; it is part of the history of its modernization.From the late eighteenth century onward, the Jewish community played a significant role in the development of Dolnja Lendava. Its members were merchants, innkeepers, craftsmen, physicians, and entrepreneurs. They established a Jewish school, contributed to the creation of the town’s first savings bank, and helped shape its economic and cultural life. In the multilingual environment of Prekmurje, they served as a bridge between the Hungarian, Slovene, and wider Central European worlds.

Built in 1866, the synagogue stood at the heart of this community life—a place of worship, learning, and comunity. In April 1944, that world was almost entirely destroyed in the Holocaust. Today, the Lendava Synagogue remains one of the few preserved witnesses to Jewish presence in Slovenia and a reminder of the vital contribution of a community without which the history of Lendava cannot be fully understood.

The beginnings of Jewish settlement in Prekmurje

Prekmurje: a different history of Jewish life in Slovenia

The history of the Jews of Prekmurje differs fundamentally from the history of Jewish communities in other parts of present-day Slovenia. While Jews were expelled from Carniola, Styria and Carinthia at the end of the Middle Ages and were not permitted to return there permanently until the nineteenth century, Prekmurje remained part of the Kingdom of Hungary until 1918. Because of this different political and legal development, the only sizeable and continuously present Jewish community in the territory of present-day Slovenia emerged here.

The history of the Jews of Prekmurje should therefore not be understood as a continuation of the medieval Jewish communities of Maribor or Ljubljana, but as part of the history of Hungarian Jewry. Its roots extended into the broader region of western Hungary, present-day Hungary, Burgenland, Slovakia and Croatia, from which the first Jewish families arrived during the eighteenth century.

Although Jews always remained a numerical minority in Prekmurje, over the following two centuries they developed the strongest network of Jewish religious communities, synagogues, schools and charitable institutions in the Slovene lands. They also made an important contribution to the economic and cultural development of the region.

A region at the crossroads of different worlds

Prekmurje lay at an important crossroads of Central European trade routes. To the west, the River Mura separated it from Styria, while to the east it opened towards western Hungary. Routes passing through the region connected Vienna, Graz, Szombathely, Nagykanizsa, Budapest, Varaždin and Zagreb.

The region was distinctly multicultural. Slovenes, Hungarians, Germans, Croats and Jews lived there, while different languages intertwined in everyday life, trade and administration. This openness created favourable conditions for the development of commerce and entrepreneurship.

The predominantly agricultural economy required people capable of connecting local production with larger markets. This role was frequently assumed by Jewish families whose commercial and kinship networks extended far beyond the borders of Prekmurje.

The first Jewish Families

The earliest reliable references to Jews in Prekmurje date from the first half of the eighteenth century. At first, these were individual families engaged primarily in trade, leasing and innkeeping.

Sources mention a Jewish presence in Dolnja Lendava as early as 1725, while individual early references are also known from Domanjševci and other settlements near the Hungarian border. These families did not yet constitute organised religious communities. They were individual settlers whose right of residence depended on the permission of local landowners.

Most came from nearby settlements in western Hungary. They travelled along established family and commercial routes and sought places where they could pursue activities needed by the local economy.

Why did they come to Prekmurje?

In the eighteenth century, Prekmurje was economically less developed than the larger cities of the Habsburg Monarchy, yet it offered numerous business opportunities. Noble landowners required tenants to manage inns, mills, distilleries, toll stations and other manorial rights, while developing market towns needed experienced merchants.

Jewish families purchased grain, wine, livestock, hides and poultry and sold textiles, hardware, salt, paraffin and other goods. They became an important link between the Prekmurje countryside and the larger markets of Central Europe.

Their economic activity was not limited to trade. They worked as innkeepers, craftspeople and intermediaries and, later, as entrepreneurs, printers, physicians, pharmacists and lawyers.

Legal status

The legal status of Jews in the Kingdom of Hungary was not one of equality, but it was more favourable than in many other parts of the Habsburg Monarchy.

The right of settlement depended on the permission of landowners. Jews were required to pay special taxes and were subject to various restrictions concerning land ownership and entry into certain professions.

An important step forward came with the reforms of Joseph II. His Edict of Toleration of 1783 did not grant full equality, but it enabled Jews to participate more broadly in the economy, education and public life. It also encouraged the adoption of permanent surnames and the greater use of the official languages of the state.

These changes accelerated the settlement of Jewish families in Prekmurje and enabled the formation of the first permanent communities.

From Individual families to organised communities

Until the end of the eighteenth century, the Jewish population remained relatively small, but it was growing rapidly. Families no longer arrived only as isolated individuals; they began to organise themselves into religious communities.

At first, services were held in private homes. When a sufficient number of adult Jewish men were present to form a regular prayer quorum, the first prayer rooms were established, cemeteries were arranged and religious teachers and ritual slaughterers began to be employed.

From these modest beginnings emerged communities that would construct synagogues and establish rabbinates, schools and charitable societies during the nineteenth century.

The three pillars of Jewish life in Prekmurje

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Dolnja Lendava, Murska Sobota and Beltinci had become firmly established as the principal centres of Jewish life.

Each settlement developed its own religious community, cemetery and, later, synagogue and communal institutions. Close family, economic and religious ties existed among them, while all three were also integrated into the wider network of Jewish communities in western Hungary.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, Prekmurje was home to the largest and best-organised Jewish population in the territory of present-day Slovenia.

More than immigrants

Although the first generations had arrived from neighbouring Hungarian regions, Jews soon became an inseparable part of Prekmurje society.

Their shops, inns, workshops and businesses became integral parts of urban life. Their children grew up alongside peers of different nationalities, spoke several languages and participated in the development of the local economy.

Over the following two centuries, Jews made an important contribution to the modernisation of Prekmurje. Their history is therefore not the history of a community living on the margins of society, but the history of people who helped shape the region itself.

Conclusion

The beginnings of Jewish settlement in Prekmurje constitute one of the most important chapters in the history of the Slovene lands. At a time when permanent Jewish presence was still prohibited in most Slovene regions, communities were already taking shape east of the Mura. These communities became important agents of economic development, religious life and cultural diversity.

From the first families emerged the Jewish communities of Murska Sobota, Dolnja Lendava and Beltinci, which became the heart of Jewish life in the territory of present-day Slovenia during the nineteenth century. The following chapter traces their development into organised religious communities and examines the emergence of synagogues, rabbinates, schools and other institutions that shaped the lives of the Jews of Prekmurje for almost two centuries.

The formation of Jewish communities in Prekmurje

From individual families to an organised community

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Jewish presence in Prekmurje consisted of only a few families scattered across market towns and villages. Their lives were closely connected with the economic needs of the local environment, while their religious organisation remained modest. Services were held in private homes, religious ceremonies were often led by the most learned members of the community and, for more complex religious needs, they depended on nearby Jewish communities in western Hungary.

The presence of several Jewish families alone was not sufficient to establish a fully functioning Jewish community. The community needed to be sufficiently numerous and economically stable to maintain a place of worship, a cemetery, religious teachers, a ritual slaughterer, or shochet, and eventually a rabbi. Only then could a kehilla emerge: an organised Jewish religious community responsible for the religious, social and cultural life of its members.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, these conditions were gradually fulfilled in three places that would remain the principal centres of Jewish life in Prekmurje for almost two centuries: Dolnja Lendava, Murska Sobota and Beltinci.

Dolnja Lendava: the oldest centre

The oldest, and for a long time the most important, Jewish community in the territory of present-day Slovenia developed in Dolnja Lendava.

The town stood on an important transport route between Nagykanizsa, Zalaegerszeg, Varaždin and the Hungarian interior. This position created favourable conditions for the trade in grain, wine, livestock and other goods, and Jewish merchant families settled there at an early date.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the community already maintained a cemetery, organised worship and its own religious administration. In 1866, a new synagogue was built, one of the finest synagogues in the territory of present-day Slovenia. With its elegant late Neoclassical architecture, it was not only a religious centre but also an expression of the confidence of a community then experiencing considerable economic and cultural prosperity.

A rabbinate, religious school, charitable societies and other institutions operated around the synagogue. Dolnja Lendava became the principal religious centre for the Jewish population of south-eastern Prekmurje and an important link with the Jewish communities of western Hungary.

A distinctive feature of the Lendava community was its strong economic activity. Jewish entrepreneurs made important contributions to the development of trade, hospitality, banking, printing and early industry and played a decisive role in the transformation of the town into a modern commercial centre.

Murska Sobota: the heart of Jewish life in Prekmurje

While Dolnja Lendava was the oldest community, Murska Sobota became the leading religious, economic and cultural centre of Jewish life during the second half of the nineteenth century.

The town developed rapidly as the administrative centre of Prekmurje. As trade, crafts and public institutions expanded, the Jewish population also increased. The community soon became large enough to support its own rabbi, religious school and numerous charitable institutions.

Three synagogues stood in the town over the course of its history. The last, built between 1907 and 1908 according to plans by the celebrated Budapest architect Lipót Baumhorn, ranked among the most beautiful synagogues in Central Europe. Baumhorn designed more than twenty synagogues throughout the former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and is regarded as the foremost synagogue architect of his era.

The Murska Sobota synagogue combined Historicist and Secessionist elements with Orientalist motifs characteristic of Central European Jewish architecture. Its imposing dome, richly decorated interior, women’s gallery and representative façade expressed the confidence of the community at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The synagogue was not destroyed by wartime damage. It was demolished in 1954 by decision of the post-war authorities. Its destruction is now regarded as one of the greatest losses to Jewish cultural heritage in Slovenia.

Beltinci: an important regional centre

The third major Jewish community developed in Beltinci. Although it was smaller than the communities of Lendava and Murska Sobota, it played an important economic and religious role. Jewish families were especially active in the trade in livestock, grain, wine and textiles, while many also operated inns and shops.

The Beltinci synagogue was built in 1860 and became the centre of a vibrant religious life. The community also maintained a cemetery, charitable institutions and religious education.

Although Beltinci never became as large a centre as Murska Sobota or Dolnja Lendava, it formed an important part of the network of Jewish communities in Prekmurje and maintained close relations with both larger communities.

A network of smaller communities

In addition to the three principal communities, Jewish families lived in numerous other settlements throughout Prekmurje.

They could be found in Turnišče, Dobrovnik, Črenšovci, Cankova, Radenci and elsewhere. Most of these settlements did not possess their own synagogues or rabbis. Instead, their Jewish residents were affiliated with the larger communities of Murska Sobota or Dolnja Lendava.

This form of organisation was common throughout Hungary. Larger communities provided a rabbi, a religious court and educational services, while smaller groups maintained everyday religious life in their own local environments.

The emergence of communal institutions

As the communities grew, they began to establish the institutions without which organised Jewish life could not exist.

Cemeteries and prayer rooms were among the first institutions to be created. These were followed by religious schools, rabbinates, charitable societies and the Chevra Kadisha, the burial society responsible for the dignified burial of the dead.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, women’s charitable societies, youth organisations and funds for the relief of the poor also emerged. This network of institutions demonstrates that the Jewish population of Prekmurje was not merely a collection of merchants, but a group of highly organised religious communities comparable to others in western Hungary.

The Jewish congress and internal change

The second half of the nineteenth century was also marked by the development of modern Hungarian Jewry. Following the Jewish Congress held in Budapest in 1868–1869, Jewish communities in Hungary responded differently to questions of modernisation, worship and communal organisation. Neolog, Orthodox and so-called Status Quo Ante communities emerged.

The communities of Prekmurje were also involved in these debates, yet despite differences of outlook, they maintained close relations with one another. Their principal concerns remained religious life, education, charity and the cohesion of the community.

The communities as part of Prekmurje’s development

Jewish communities were not closed religious enclaves. Their synagogues, schools, shops, inns, pharmacies and businesses became integral parts of urban life.

Jewish merchants participated in fairs, physicians treated the entire population, entrepreneurs invested in the development of towns and charitable societies frequently assisted people beyond the boundaries of their own community.

The nineteenth-century development of Murska Sobota, Dolnja Lendava and Beltinci therefore cannot be understood without their Jewish communities.

Conclusion

During the nineteenth century, three principal Jewish communities developed in Dolnja Lendava, Murska Sobota and Beltinci. Together they created the densest network of organised Jewish life in the territory of present-day Slovenia. Their synagogues, cemeteries, rabbinates, schools and charitable societies testify to a high degree of organisation and to the close integration of Jews into the life of Prekmurje.

These communities formed the core of Jewish life in the Slovene lands, reaching their greatest prosperity during the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Their history was not merely the history of a religious minority, but an important part of the history of the entire region. The following chapter examines more closely their internal organisation, religious life and the institutions that shaped the everyday lives of the Jews of Prekmurje for almost two centuries.

The religious and communal life of the Jews of Prekmurje

Community as a way of life

For the Jews of Prekmurje, religion was not limited to worship in the synagogue. The Jewish community represented a comprehensive way of life connecting family, religious practice, education, charity and mutual assistance. Every major stage of life, including birth, coming of age, marriage and death, was embedded within the life of the community, which cared for its members from birth until death.

In this respect, the Jewish community differed from many other religious organisations. It was not simply a place of prayer, but also a social, educational and charitable institution. Its task was to preserve religious tradition while providing assistance to members in their everyday lives.

During the nineteenth century, the Jewish communities of Prekmurje achieved a high level of organisation and became comparable to other Jewish communities in western Hungary.

The kehilla: the organised Jewish community

The central institution of Jewish life was the kehilla, the Jewish religious community.

It was led by elected communal officials together with the rabbi. They were responsible for financing the community, maintaining the synagogue, cemetery, religious school and charitable institutions. They decided on the appointment of religious functionaries, administered communal property and represented the community before the state authorities.

The community’s income came from membership contributions, voluntary donations, bequests and payments made by wealthier families. A significant part of communal life also depended on the voluntary work of its members.

This form of organisation enabled a considerable degree of independence and was one of the reasons Jewish communities were able to preserve their identity within the multicultural environment of Prekmurje.

The rabbi: teacher, judge and spiritual leader

The rabbi stood at the head of religious life.

His responsibilities were not limited to conducting services. He was an interpreter of the Torah and Jewish law, a religious teacher, an adviser to families, a supervisor of kosher food and an authority in resolving religious and ethical questions.

The most prominent rabbi of Prekmurje during the first half of the twentieth century was Dr Lazar Roth, who assumed the rabbinate of Murska Sobota in 1926. He had been educated at respected rabbinical institutions of the former Austro-Hungarian world and was known as an exceptionally learned scholar. He spoke several European languages, and his private library was among the richest in the region.

Roth embodied the model of the modern Central European rabbi: deeply rooted in Jewish tradition yet open to modern education and dialogue with the surrounding society. His deportation in 1944 symbolises the end of centuries of organised rabbinical life in Prekmurje.

The synagogue: the centre of the community

Although a synagogue is often understood primarily as a place of prayer, its role was far broader.

The Hebrew expression beit knesset means “house of assembly,” beit midrash means “house of study,” and beit tefillah means “house of prayer.” The synagogue was therefore a place where the community gathered, studied and prayed.

Services, public readings of the Torah, children’s instruction, lectures, community assemblies, charitable activities and numerous meetings took place there. It was the place in which the collective identity of the Jews of Prekmurje was formed.

The most important synagogues stood in Murska Sobota and Dolnja Lendava. The synagogue in Murska Sobota, designed by Lipót Baumhorn, ranked among the finest in Central Europe, while the synagogue in Lendava remains one of the most important surviving Jewish monuments in Slovenia.

The Torah and education

At the heart of every synagogue stood the Sefer Torah, the handwritten parchment scroll of the Five Books of Moses.

Writing a Torah scroll was among the most demanding tasks in Jewish tradition. A specially trained scribe, or sofer, had to write every letter in accordance with strict religious rules. Even the smallest error could render the scroll unfit for use in worship.

The reading of the Torah was fundamental to religious life and was also one of the reasons education was held in particularly high regard among Jews. Literacy was not considered the privilege of a few, but a religious obligation.

Children began learning Hebrew reading, prayers and the foundations of Jewish tradition at an early age. Alongside religious education, they attended state schools, and many continued their studies in Budapest, Graz, Vienna or Bratislava.

This high level of education made an important contribution to the later economic and cultural development of the Jewish community.

Charity as an obligation

• Tzedakah*, charitable giving, occupies a special place in Jewish tradition.

In Judaism, assisting people in need is understood not merely as an act of compassion but as a moral and religious obligation. For this reason, almost every larger Jewish community established charitable societies to care for the poor, the sick, widows, orphans and the elderly.

The Chevra Kadisha, or burial society, also played an important role. It prepared the deceased for burial, organised the funeral rites and supported bereaved families. Its work was based on the belief that caring for the dead was among the highest expressions of human dignity.

A Jewish Women’s Society was established in Murska Sobota in 1882. It organised assistance for poor families, raised funds for the sick and participated in numerous charitable initiatives.

Cemeteries: houses of eternity

One of the first signs of permanent Jewish settlement was the establishment of a cemetery.

A Jewish cemetery is known in Hebrew as a beit olam, a “house of eternity.” According to Jewish tradition, the grave is the permanent resting place of the deceased, and cemeteries were therefore not normally abandoned or disturbed.

The oldest Jewish cemeteries in Prekmurje were established as early as the end of the eighteenth century. Their gravestones, generally inscribed in Hebrew and Hungarian, bear witness to religious life, family relationships and the cultural world in which the community lived.

Today, they rank among the most valuable material monuments of former Jewish life in Slovenia.

Women as pillars of the community

Although historical sources most frequently mention rabbis and merchants, the life of the community also depended to a great extent on women.

They cared for the household, the religious education of children, the preparation of kosher food, charitable work and the preservation of family customs. Much of Jewish identity was transmitted from one generation to the next within the home.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, organised women’s charitable societies also began to emerge. They provided social assistance and raised funds for the community. Their work often remained outside official records, yet it was indispensable to the life of the Jewish communities.

A community open to the world

Although the Jews of Prekmurje carefully preserved their religious identity, they did not live in isolation from the society around them.

Their children attended state schools, many studied at European universities, merchants traded throughout the region and physicians and pharmacists cared for all inhabitants regardless of religion.

This openness did not mean abandoning Jewish tradition, but adapting it to the modern world. The Judaism of Prekmurje was therefore a characteristic expression of Central European Jewish culture, combining respect for tradition with a high level of education and active participation in public life.

Conclusion

The religious life of the Jews of Prekmurje was not confined to worship or to the synagogue. It was based on a dense network of institutions that connected individuals with their community throughout their lives. Rabbis, synagogues, schools, cemeteries, charitable societies and families together created a world in which faith, learning, solidarity and responsibility towards the community formed an indivisible whole.

Because of this high level of organisation, the Jewish communities of Prekmurje became the most developed Jewish communities in the territory of present-day Slovenia during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Their influence was not limited to religious life; it also left a significant mark on the economic, cultural and social development of Prekmurje as a whole.

Economy, trade and the modernisation of Prekmurje

The economic importance of the Jewish community

When the first Jewish families began settling in Prekmurje during the eighteenth century, the region was predominantly agricultural. Most inhabitants lived from farming, animal husbandry and viticulture, while the larger settlements were small market towns with limited crafts and commerce.

It was within this environment that Jews found their economic role. Because of long-standing restrictions on land ownership, they turned primarily to activities that did not require extensive landed property: trade, leasing, hospitality, moneylending, crafts and, later, industry. Through their entrepreneurial knowledge and broad commercial connections, they made an important contribution to integrating Prekmurje into the Central European economic sphere.

Their influence greatly exceeded their numerical presence. Although Jews never constituted more than a small proportion of the population, they were among the most active agents of economic modernisation in the region.

Trade as a link between the countryside and Europe

Trade was the most important occupation of the Jews of Prekmurje.

They purchased grain, maize, wine, flax, hemp, wool, hides, feathers, eggs and livestock and sold them in the markets of Nagykanizsa, Szombathely, Budapest, Graz, Vienna and elsewhere in the monarchy. Textiles, hardware, colonial goods, sugar, coffee, paraffin, glass and numerous other products not manufactured locally travelled in the opposite direction into Prekmurje.

Jewish merchants were important intermediaries between rural producers and the wider European market. Their knowledge of prices, trading routes and commercial networks enabled local produce to be sold far beyond the region.

Many shops were family businesses passed down from one generation to the next. Family connections between households in Prekmurje, Budapest, Vienna, Varaždin and Zagreb enabled the rapid exchange of information, goods and capital.

Inns, mills and leases

During the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, many Jews worked as tenants of manorial rights.

Noble landowners leased inns, mills, toll stations, butcheries, distilleries and other economic enterprises to them. This arrangement benefited both parties: the landowners secured reliable managers for their estates, while Jewish families gained opportunities for economic advancement.

An inn was not merely a place where food and drink were served. It was also a commercial, transport and social centre where transactions were concluded, news exchanged and fairs organised. Jewish innkeepers therefore played an important role in the development of the local economy.

Crafts and emerging industry

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the economic character of Prekmurje began to change.

In addition to commerce, Jews established small industrial plants, printing houses, brickyards, sawmills, distilleries, warehouses and various manufacturing enterprises. They also worked as watchmakers, goldsmiths, tailors, shoemakers, booksellers, photographers and printers.

Their role in introducing modern business practices was particularly important. They were among the first to use systematic bookkeeping, credit arrangements, insurance and long-term commercial contracts. In this way, they contributed to the professionalisation of the regional economy.

Their businesses employed not only Jews but people of all nationalities and religions. The economic development they encouraged benefited the region as a whole.

Banking and capital

Economic development also required access to capital. During the second half of the nineteenth century, a number of Jewish entrepreneurs were among the founders of savings banks, credit institutions and other financial organisations. They enabled the financing of commerce, crafts and the construction of new businesses and contributed to the emergence of a modern financial system in the region.

Their activities were especially important for small craftspeople and farmers, who gained access to longer-term financing for the first time.

In this way, Jews contributed significantly to the transition from a traditional subsistence economy to a modern market economy.

The liberal professions

By the end of the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of young Jews had obtained university educations.

Jewish physicians, lawyers, pharmacists, notaries, teachers and engineers practised in Murska Sobota and Dolnja Lendava. Their services were intended not only for the Jewish community but for the population as a whole.

Dr Aleksander Balkányi, one of the most highly regarded physicians in Prekmurje, was especially prominent among them. His work left an important mark on the development of modern healthcare in the region, and he enjoyed great respect among the population regardless of nationality or religion.

Such individuals demonstrate how significantly the economic and social role of Jews had expanded by the beginning of the twentieth century. They were no longer merely merchants but an important part of the educated middle class.

An engine of urban development

The rapid growth of Murska Sobota and Dolnja Lendava during the second half of the nineteenth century was not accidental.

Jewish entrepreneurs participated in the construction of new commercial buildings, hotels, residential properties, warehouses and public facilities. Their shops transformed the appearance of town centres, while their enterprises created new employment.

The development of railway connections opened even broader economic opportunities. Jewish merchants were among the first to take advantage of the new transport routes and expanded their operations throughout the monarchy.

Prekmurje thus gradually became part of the modern Central European economic sphere.

Economic success and prejudice

The success of Jewish entrepreneurs frequently aroused admiration but also envy. By the end of the nineteenth century, stereotypes concerning an alleged Jewish dominance of the economy began appearing in newspapers and political debates. Such ideas were widespread throughout Central Europe and did not reflect the actual position of most Jewish inhabitants.

A large proportion of the Jews of Prekmurje belonged to the middle class. Alongside successful entrepreneurs were modest shopkeepers, craftspeople, clerks and families dependent on communal assistance.

Nevertheless, antisemitic prejudices often generalised the image of the entire community and associated it exclusively with wealth and trade. Such stereotypes later became one of the foundations of political antisemitism.

Modernisation as a shared endeavour

The economic development of Prekmurje cannot be attributed to any single population group. Slovenes, Hungarians, Germans, Croats and Jews all contributed to its advancement.

Yet because of its entrepreneurial orientation, international connections and high level of education, the Jewish community played a disproportionately important role in the region’s modernisation. It helped develop trade, banking, healthcare, crafts, industry and urban life and connected Prekmurje more closely with the economic currents of Central Europe.

Its contribution became so deeply embedded in everyday life that contemporaries often took it for granted. Only after the destruction of the community during the Holocaust did it become fully apparent how important a place it had occupied in the life of the region.

Conclusion

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews had become one of the principal agents of economic development in Prekmurje. Their shops, businesses, inns, banks and professional services contributed significantly to the transformation of a predominantly agricultural region into a modern Central European society.

Their success was not based on privilege, but on enterprise, education, family networks and a willingness to adapt to changing economic circumstances. The history of the Jews of Prekmurje is therefore not only the history of a minority, but also an essential part of the economic history of the entire region.

Jews and Prekmurje society

Life in a multicultural region

Throughout its history, Prekmurje was a meeting place of different peoples, languages and religions. Slovenes, Hungarians, Germans, Croats and Jews inhabited the same economic and social space, where their paths crossed every day. This environment created the particular conditions within which Jewish communities developed.

Jews did not live in closed quarters or ghettos of the kind known from medieval Western European cities. Their houses, shops and workshops formed part of the urban centres of Murska Sobota, Dolnja Lendava, Beltinci and other settlements. They interacted daily with neighbours, business partners and customers and were active participants in local life.

Their identity was grounded in Jewish religion and tradition, yet they were also inhabitants of Prekmurje and citizens of the state in which they lived.

Several languages, one community

Multilingualism was a distinctive characteristic of the Jews of Prekmurje.

In everyday life, they primarily used Hungarian, the official language of the Kingdom of Hungary during the nineteenth century. Hebrew remained the language of worship, prayer and religious education, while German played an important role in commerce, culture and schooling.

Following the incorporation of Prekmurje into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1919, many Jews gradually learned Slovene and began using it in public life.

This linguistic adaptability was one of the community’s greatest strengths. It enabled Jews to conduct business across different cultural environments and facilitated their integration into society without requiring them to abandon their religious identity.

Education and bourgeois culture

By the second half of the nineteenth century, literacy among Jews was generally higher than the regional average. The great importance placed by Jewish tradition on learning and the reading of sacred texts encouraged many parents to support the continued education of their children.

Many young people from Murska Sobota, Dolnja Lendava and Beltinci studied in Budapest, Graz, Vienna or other university centres of the monarchy. They returned as physicians, lawyers, pharmacists, teachers or entrepreneurs and made important contributions to the development of the region.

Jewish families actively participated in bourgeois culture. They attended the theatre, followed music, literature and the visual arts, joined associations and supported cultural initiatives. Their homes frequently reflected a Central European middle-class lifestyle in which Jewish tradition and modern culture were intertwined.

Good neighbourly relations

Most relations between Jews and their neighbours were ordinary and pragmatic.

People traded with one another, attended the same fairs, served together on municipal committees, consulted the same physicians, employed the same craftspeople and encountered one another in streets, markets and inns. Long-standing friendships developed between families and were not determined by religious affiliation.

Numerous recollections testify to mutual respect and trust. Jewish merchants often extended credit, physicians treated all patients regardless of their social status and charitable societies sometimes assisted non-Jewish inhabitants as well.

Such coexistence did not amount to complete equality, but it demonstrates that Jews were an important and generally accepted part of the local environment.

Assimilation and the preservation of identity

From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, the Jews of Prekmurje became increasingly integrated into the broader bourgeois society.

Families adopted modern styles of dress, sent their children to universities, participated in public life and became increasingly involved in economic and cultural institutions.

Nevertheless, most did not abandon their Jewish identity. Synagogues remained the centres of communal life, religious ceremonies continued to be observed, cemeteries remained important symbols of belonging and Jewish charitable societies continued to care for the community.

The Jews of Prekmurje thus lived between two worlds: as active citizens of modern society and as members of an ancient religious tradition.

Antisemitism

Although coexistence was largely peaceful, Jews were not entirely protected from prejudice.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, modern antisemitic ideas also began to spread in Hungary. Jews were depicted as allegedly over-powerful in the economy or as politically dangerous. Such stereotypes formed part of broader European political movements and did not originate in Prekmurje itself.

Open violence was relatively rare in everyday life, but prejudices existed. During periods of economic crisis or political tension, they could quickly intensify.

After the First World War, and especially during the 1930s, anti-Jewish sentiment grew under the influence of developments elsewhere in Europe. Newspaper articles, political propaganda and the legislation of neighbouring states gradually created an atmosphere that prepared the ground for the tragedy that followed during the Second World War.

Between civic belonging and Jewish identity

Following the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918, the Jews of Prekmurje had to adapt to a new political reality.

Almost overnight, they became citizens of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Many learned Slovene, participated in the new public life and continued their economic activities.

Although they maintained close family and cultural ties with Hungary, most integrated loyally into the new state. This dual belonging—to the local community and to Jewish tradition—remained one of the defining characteristics of Jewish life in Prekmurje until the Second World War.

Part of Prekmurje’s shared history

The history of Prekmurje cannot be understood without its Jewish inhabitants.

They contributed to the development of commerce, healthcare, education, culture and urban life. Their shops, synagogues, pharmacies, businesses and homes formed part of the everyday appearance of the region.

The Holocaust therefore meant not only the destruction of a religious community, but also the loss of an important part of Prekmurje’s cultural, economic and social history.

Conclusion

Relations between Jews and the majority population of Prekmurje throughout most of the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were characterised primarily by cooperation, mutual dependence and everyday contact. Jews were an integral part of urban and economic life, and their families made important contributions to the development of the region.

At the same time, history demonstrates how fragile social acceptance can be. Prejudices that had remained on the margins of public life for decades could, during a period of political upheaval, rapidly turn into systematic exclusion and ultimately the complete destruction of a community. The history of the Jews of Prekmurje is therefore not only a story of successful integration, but also a warning of how quickly a society can lose a part of itself.

Prominent individuals and families

The people who helped shape the history of Prekmurje

The history of the Jews of Prekmurje cannot be understood solely through institutions, synagogues or economic development. Its true character was shaped by people: merchants, physicians, rabbis, teachers, entrepreneurs, craftspeople and benefactors whose work left a lasting mark on the region.

Most did not work only within the Jewish community. Their shops served all inhabitants, their medical practices treated patients regardless of religion, their businesses employed people of different nationalities and their charitable activities frequently extended beyond the boundaries of their own community.

Their life stories demonstrate how closely the fate of the Jews was intertwined with the fate of Prekmurje itself.

Rabbi dr Lazar Roth, 1894–1944

Rabbi Dr Lazar Roth, the last prominent rabbi of Murska Sobota, undoubtedly ranks among the most important figures in the history of Jewish life in Prekmurje.

After studying at respected rabbinical institutions, he assumed leadership of the Jewish community of Murska Sobota in 1926. He was an exceptionally learned scholar, an accomplished speaker and an authority on Jewish law. In addition to Hebrew, he spoke Hungarian, German and several other languages. His extensive library was among the largest private libraries in Prekmurje.

Roth was far more than a religious leader. He was a teacher, adviser, organiser of charitable activity and an important source of cohesion within the community. He was responsible for the religious education of children, conducted services, resolved questions of Jewish law and represented the community before the authorities.

In 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz together with most of the Jews of Prekmurje and was murdered there. His death marked the end of centuries of organised rabbinical life in the region.

Dr Aleksander Balkányi, 1871–1938

Dr Aleksander Balkányi was one of the most highly regarded physicians in the history of Prekmurje.

After completing his medical studies, he returned to Murska Sobota, where he treated inhabitants from throughout the region for several decades. His expertise and dedication earned him considerable respect among both Jews and Christians.

He was also active in numerous public institutions and made an important contribution to the development of modern healthcare in the region. His practice was open to all patients regardless of social position or nationality.

Balkányi represents a generation of educated Jewish townspeople who understood their knowledge as a form of service to society.

Merchant and entrepreneurial families

The development of Murska Sobota and Dolnja Lendava was closely connected with numerous Jewish families that pursued trade, crafts and entrepreneurship over several generations.

Their shops offered goods from Budapest, Vienna and other European cities. They purchased agricultural produce and traded in wine, livestock, textiles and hardware. They established savings banks, inns, printing houses and manufacturing enterprises.

Their economic activity did not represent personal success alone. It also contributed significantly to the development of towns and the creation of new employment.

Although the largest names are best remembered today, it was the work of numerous lesser-known families that helped shape the economic character of Prekmurje.

Teachers, lawyers and pharmacists

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Jews had become an important part of the educated middle class of Prekmurje.

They worked as teachers, lawyers, notaries, pharmacists, bankers and civil servants. Their work contributed significantly to the modernisation of public life and the expansion of education and healthcare.

Their professional careers demonstrate the importance the Jewish community placed on learning. University education was not a rare exception, but an ideal towards which younger generations were encouraged to strive.

The women who sustained the community

Women also occupy an important place in the history of the Jews of Prekmurje, although historical sources mention them far less frequently than men.

They cared for their families, the religious education of children, charitable activity and the preservation of Jewish tradition. They were active in women’s charitable societies, organised assistance for the poor, raised funds for the sick and participated in numerous communal activities.

Most of their work remained outside official records, yet Jewish communities could not have functioned without it.

The younger generation

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new generation of Jews was growing up in Prekmurje.

They studied at universities in Budapest, Graz, Vienna and elsewhere in Europe. They became physicians, lawyers, engineers, professors and entrepreneurs.

Many believed they would build their future in Prekmurje and continue the work of their parents. Few could have imagined that their lives would be cut short only a few decades later by the Holocaust.

The destruction of this younger generation was one of the greatest tragedies to befall the Jews of Prekmurje.

Remembering individuals

After the Second World War, most former Jewish homes remained empty.

For many families, only photographs, gravestones, documents and a few personal possessions survived. Many descendants now live in Israel, the United States, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere in the world.

Their stories form part of the history of Prekmurje, even though their lives were violently interrupted.

Every surviving name, photograph or gravestone preserves a precious memory of people who helped shape the region for almost two centuries.

Conclusion

The history of the Jews of Prekmurje was shaped by people of many professions and different paths of life: rabbis, physicians, entrepreneurs, teachers, merchants, craftspeople, mothers and children. Their stories show that the Jewish community was not a uniform group, but a diverse society whose members made important contributions to the development of Prekmurje.

Their heritage is visible not only in surviving synagogues or cemeteries, but also in the development of towns, institutions and the cultural environment that exists today. Remembering them therefore remains an important part of the shared history of Slovenia.

Prominent Jewish families of Prekmurje

The core of Jewish life in Prekmurje consisted not only of rabbis and distinguished individuals, but of numerous families that helped shape the economic, cultural and social life of the region over several generations. Their names appear in commercial registers, municipal records, tax documents, school records, newspapers and the recollections of contemporaries. Each family contributed in its own way to the development of Murska Sobota, Dolnja Lendava, Beltinci and other settlements.

Among the most prominent were the Balkányi, Roth, Blau, Hirschler, Schwarz, Pollak, Glück, Klein, Weisz, Fischer, Singer, Steiner, Löwy, Neumann, Kohn, Deutsch, Berger, Spitzer, Grünhut, Friedmann, Stern, Hoffmann, Adler and Rosenberg families, as well as many others whose descendants now live throughout Europe, Israel, the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Some families were known primarily as merchants dealing in grain, wine or textiles, while others worked as innkeepers, craftspeople, physicians, pharmacists or lawyers. What they shared was their close integration into the life of their towns and villages. Their shops were meeting places for people of different nationalities, their businesses employed local inhabitants and their children attended the same schools as their peers.

Their family connections extended far beyond Prekmurje. They had relatives in Budapest, Nagykanizsa, Szombathely, Zagreb, Varaždin, Graz, Vienna and elsewhere. These connections facilitated the circulation of goods, capital, knowledge and ideas and made an important contribution to the region’s economic development.

Following the Holocaust, most of these families disappeared from Prekmurje. Their houses acquired new owners, their businesses ceased to operate and many family names survived only on gravestones, in archival documents or in the recollections of the few survivors.

A lost generation

Children and young people form a distinct and particularly poignant chapter of this history.

Photographs from the 1920s and 1930s show smiling schoolchildren in front of the synagogues of Murska Sobota and Lendava, young men participating in scouting and sports associations, students at universities in Budapest, Graz and Vienna, and young families who believed in the future.

Many did not live to reach the age of thirty. The deportations of 1944 destroyed almost an entire generation of Jews from Prekmurje. With them disappeared future physicians, teachers, entrepreneurs, artists, rabbis and craftspeople. The Holocaust meant not only the loss of the people then living, but also the loss of the community’s future.

The people behind the numbers

Statistics can tell us how many Jews lived in a particular settlement and how many were deported, but they cannot tell us who those people were.

Behind every number was an individual: a merchant who opened his shop every morning; a physician who went out at night to treat a patient; a child learning Hebrew; a mother preparing the Shabbat meal; an elderly man who had prayed in the same synagogue for decades.

It is their personal stories that give history a human face. Through them, the history of the Jews of Prekmurje becomes not merely a chronology of events but the story of a community that helped shape the region for almost two centuries and then almost completely disappeared within a few months.

Between Hungary and Yugoslavia, 1918–1941

A new state and new borders

The First World War radically transformed the political map of Central Europe. With the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918, the state of which Prekmurje had been part for centuries ceased to exist. In 1919, the region was incorporated into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, marking the beginning of an entirely new era for its inhabitants.

For the Jewish community, this change was not merely political. Almost overnight, its members became citizens of a new state with a new administration, a new official language and a different legal system. Many had spent their entire lives closely connected with Budapest, Szombathely or Nagykanizsa through family ties, business relationships and education. The new border suddenly severed these connections or at least made them considerably more difficult.

Nevertheless, most Jews of Prekmurje adapted relatively quickly to the new circumstances. They preserved their businesses, shops and crafts, gradually learned Slovene and became involved in the life of the new state.

Economic adaptation

The alteration of state borders had a profound impact on the economy of Prekmurje.

Trade routes that had led towards Budapest and the Hungarian interior for centuries were interrupted or obstructed. Entrepreneurs had to seek new markets in Ljubljana, Maribor, Zagreb and Belgrade. This was not a simple process, but many Jewish merchants adapted with relative success owing to their experience.

Despite the economic difficulties that followed the First World War, Jews remained an important part of urban commerce. Their shops, inns, pharmacies and businesses continued to play an important role in the everyday life of Murska Sobota, Dolnja Lendava and other settlements.

Prosperity between the wars

The 1920s represented the final period of prosperity for Jewish life in Prekmurje.

Synagogues were well attended, religious communities were effectively organised, children attended schools and young people studied at universities at home and abroad. Jewish physicians, lawyers, merchants and entrepreneurs enjoyed considerable respect.

Murska Sobota remained the most important centre of Jewish life in Slovenia. Rabbi Dr Lazar Roth led one of the most respected Jewish communities in the broader region, while the community maintained a rich religious, cultural and charitable life.

On the surface, the future appeared to hold no major upheavals.

The economic crisis

The global economic crisis that followed 1929 also affected Prekmurje severely.

Falling prices for agricultural produce, unemployment and declining purchasing power affected almost everyone. Shops and small enterprises failed, and many craftspeople found themselves in difficult circumstances.

In these conditions, old stereotypes about Jews began to spread. Some politicians and newspapers explained economic difficulties through simplified claims about alleged Jewish influence over trade and finance. Although such claims had no basis in reality, they contributed to growing distrust and antisemitism.

Antisemitism from elsewhere in Europe

During the 1930s, the influence of Nazi Germany and extreme nationalist movements increasingly penetrated Prekmurje.

Anti-Jewish propaganda spread through newspapers, political organisations and rumours. Although the Kingdom of Yugoslavia did not adopt racial legislation modelled directly on Nazi Germany during most of this period, Jews were increasingly subjected to prejudice and public attacks.

Developments in Austria after the Anschluss of 1938 and in Hungary, where the first anti-Jewish laws were introduced, caused growing anxiety among the Jews of Prekmurje.

Hungarian occupation

In April 1941, the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia.

Prekmurje was annexed to Hungary. For the Jewish community, this marked a dramatic turning point.

Since 1938, Hungary had already enacted anti-Jewish laws restricting Jewish access to numerous professions, economic activity, public employment and education. Following the occupation, these regulations were also imposed in Prekmurje.

Jewish civil servants lost their positions, entrepreneurs lost business opportunities and young people faced increasing barriers to education. Although mass deportations had not yet begun, it became clear that conditions were deteriorating rapidly.

The last years of freedom

Between 1941 and 1944, the life of the Jewish community gradually disintegrated.

Economic restrictions, forced labour, confiscation of property and constant fear became part of everyday existence. Many still hoped that the war would soon end or that Hungary would not follow the most extreme Nazi measures.

These hopes were finally shattered in March 1944, when Germany occupied Hungary. Within weeks, preparations began for the deportation of almost all the Jews of Prekmurje.

Conclusion

The period between 1919 and 1944 represented the final chapter in the centuries-long development of Jewish life in Prekmurje. The community successfully adapted to the new state, preserved its religious and cultural identity and remained an important part of the economic and social life of the region.

Yet beneath the surface of apparent normality, dark clouds were gathering. The economic crisis, the spread of antisemitism and Nazi racial ideology gradually undermined the position of Jews. Following the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, one of the most rapidly executed genocidal campaigns in European history began. Within a matter of weeks, almost the entire Jewish community of Prekmurje was destroyed.

The Holocaust in Prekmurje

The end of a world that had existed for two centuries

At the beginning of the Second World War, the Jewish community of Prekmurje was the largest and best organised in the territory of present-day Slovenia. The synagogues of Murska Sobota, Dolnja Lendava and Beltinci were centres of religious life, while Jewish shops, businesses and professional services were important components of the region’s economic development.

Only a few years later, almost nothing remained of this community.

The Holocaust meant not only the death of individuals, but the complete destruction of a world built over several generations. Families, religious communities, schools, charitable societies, businesses and cultural life disappeared. The history of a community that had formed an integral part of Prekmurje for more than two centuries was violently interrupted.

Hungary under German occupation

On 19 March 1944, Nazi Germany occupied Hungary in the military operation known as Margarethe. Although Hungary had until then been an ally of Germany, Hitler’s regime concluded that the Hungarian government was not implementing anti-Jewish policies with sufficient severity.

A government headed by Döme Sztójay came to power and, in close cooperation with Adolf Eichmann, began preparing the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews. This operation was among the most rapidly executed campaigns of mass deportation in the history of the Holocaust. In less than two months, more than 430,000 Jews were deported from provincial Hungary, the overwhelming majority directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Because Prekmurje had been annexed to Hungary in 1941, the same fate befell its Jewish inhabitants.

Exclusion and dispossession

Even before the deportations, the authorities systematically destroyed the economic foundations of the Jewish community.

Jewish businesses were forcibly transferred to new owners, shops were closed or “Aryanised,” bank accounts were frozen, real estate was registered and movable property was confiscated. Families were required to surrender valuables, radios and numerous personal possessions.

Men were frequently conscripted into Hungarian labour-service units, the munkaszolgálat, where they performed arduous physical labour under military supervision, without weapons and with almost no rights. Many never returned.

The destruction of the community therefore began even before its members reached the camps.

The concentration of the Jews

In April 1944, the authorities began assembling Jews from Murska Sobota, Dolnja Lendava, Beltinci and the surrounding settlements.

Families were ordered to leave their homes and were permitted to take only the most essential personal belongings. Many believed that they were being resettled for work or transferred to another settlement. Few understood what truly awaited them.

They were held in temporary collection centres and subsequently transported to the ghetto in Čakovec or to assembly camps in Hungary. From there, they were included in transports to Auschwitz during May.

For many, this was the last time they saw their home town.

The deportations of 1944

On 26 and 27 April 1944, almost the entire Jewish population of Prekmurje was rounded up. By the middle of May, its members had been included in transports travelling from Hungary directly to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The journey in cattle wagons lasted several days. Men, women, children and elderly people travelled in unbearable conditions without water, food or sanitation.

Upon arrival at Auschwitz, a selection took place.

Most children, elderly people and women with young children were sent immediately to the gas chambers. Only a smaller number of men and women deemed fit for labour were selected for forced work.

For most of the Jews of Prekmurje, the day of their arrival at Auschwitz was also the final day of their lives.

The disappearance of the community

After the deportations, towns and villages were left without their Jewish inhabitants.

Synagogues were closed. Shops were taken over by new owners. Homes were looted or assigned to others. Cemeteries were left without visitors.

Silence descended on places where rabbis, physicians, merchants, teachers and craftspeople had lived only weeks before.

A community built over more than two centuries was destroyed within a matter of weeks.

The few survivors

Only a small number of Jews from Prekmurje survived the Holocaust.

Some escaped because they had already been abroad before the war. Others survived concentration camps or labour-service units, while a few joined the Partisan resistance or survived in hiding.

When they returned after the war, they found an entirely transformed world.

Their families were gone. Their homes had been occupied or looted. The synagogues were empty, and numerous friends and relatives had been murdered.

For many, returning did not represent a new beginning, but a painful confrontation with the loss of almost everything that had once constituted their lives.

The children

Children were among the principal victims of the Holocaust.

An entire generation was growing up in the Jewish families of Prekmurje, children who might have become physicians, teachers, craftspeople, entrepreneurs and artists after the war. Most never reached adulthood.

Their photographs, preserved in family albums, are now among the most moving forms of testimony to a vanished world.

The Holocaust destroyed not only the community that existed, but also its future.

Names instead of numbers

The history of the Holocaust is often presented through numbers.

Yet behind every number was a person.

Every name represents a family, a home, a profession, friendships and plans for the future. Rabbi Lazar Roth was not merely one victim of Auschwitz, but the spiritual leader of his community. Dr Aleksander Balkányi was not merely a physician, but a man who had treated the people of Prekmurje for decades. Behind every surname on a gravestone or list of deportees was a life that was violently interrupted.

The task of historians and museums is therefore to restore to the victims their names and their stories.

Conclusion

The Holocaust resulted in the almost complete destruction of the Jewish community of Prekmurje. Within a few weeks in 1944, a community that had helped shape the region’s economic, cultural and religious life for almost two centuries disappeared.

This was not solely a Jewish tragedy. It was a tragedy for Prekmurje and for Slovenia. With the destruction of its Jewish inhabitants, the region lost part of its cultural diversity, economic creativity and historical memory.

When we walk through the streets of Murska Sobota, Lendava or Beltinci today, we often see few traces of the people who lived there for generations. Preserving their memory is therefore a responsibility of the present—not only for the sake of the past, but also for the future.

After the Holocaust

Returning to an empty world

When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, only a handful of Jewish survivors from Prekmurje returned to their home towns and villages. They came back from concentration camps, labour-service units, Partisan units or exile. Instead of home, they encountered a world they could scarcely recognise.

Their families were gone. Parents, children, brothers, sisters and other relatives had mostly been murdered in Auschwitz or other Nazi camps. Many returned as the sole surviving members of their families.

Their homes had often been looted or occupied, their shops and businesses no longer existed, the synagogues were empty and the communities to which they had belonged throughout their lives had disappeared.

For many survivors, the war did not truly end with liberation. What began instead was a life marked by a loss that could never be repaired.

A community that could not be rebuilt

Unlike some larger European cities where new Jewish communities emerged after the war, Prekmurje no longer possessed the conditions necessary for such a revival.

Before the war, Jewish life had rested upon several hundred families. After 1945, only a few individuals remained. Without a sufficient number of members, it was impossible to restore regular worship, religious education or charitable societies. There were no rabbis, the synagogues had no congregations, and many younger survivors could no longer envision a future in a place where they had lost almost everyone close to them.

For a time, the survivors still attempted to maintain contact with one another, but it soon became clear that organised Jewish life in Prekmurje could not be rebuilt.

Departures

During the years following the war, many survivors decided to leave.

Some moved to larger cities in Yugoslavia, particularly Ljubljana, Zagreb or Belgrade. Others emigrated to the United States, Canada, Australia or South America.

Following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, many chose to make aliyah and begin new lives in the Jewish state. This decision was not merely political or religious, but frequently deeply personal. Having lost their families and their former social environment, they wished to continue their lives in a place where they could once again live as part of a Jewish community.

The centuries-old history of Jewish life in Prekmurje thus continued beyond the borders of Slovenia.

The fate of the synagogues

The post-war fate of the synagogues reflected the fate of the communities that had built them.

The synagogue in Lendava lost its original religious function after the war, but the building was preserved. Today, it is one of the most important monuments of Jewish cultural heritage in Slovenia and an important venue for exhibitions, cultural events and remembrance of the former community.

The magnificent synagogue of Murska Sobota met a very different fate. It was demolished in 1954 by decision of the authorities of the time. With its destruction, Slovenia lost not only an exceptional architectural monument by Lipót Baumhorn, but also one of the most important symbols of the centuries-long Jewish presence in Prekmurje.

The synagogue of Beltinci was likewise not preserved. Lendava therefore remains the only surviving historical synagogue in Prekmurje.

Cemeteries as silent witnesses

Although the communities disappeared, Jewish cemeteries remained.

The gravestones in Dolnja Lendava and Murska Sobota now constitute some of the most valuable material sources for the study of Jewish history in Prekmurje. They preserve the names of people who shaped the life of the region, their family relationships and dates that frequently reach more than two centuries into the past.

The cemeteries have become places of memory. In places where there are no longer synagogues and almost no descendants remain, the gravestones endure as silent yet eloquent witnesses to a vanished community.

A long silence

For decades after the war, the history of the Jews of Prekmurje rarely attracted broader public attention.

The Holocaust was acknowledged as a major crime of Nazism, yet the experiences of individual Jewish communities were frequently pushed to the margins of historical memory. Many former Jewish homes remained unmarked, while numerous names gradually sank into oblivion.

Only towards the end of the twentieth century, and especially after Slovenia gained independence, did more intensive research into the history of the Jews of Prekmurje begin. Historians, museums, archives and local researchers undertook important work, collecting documents, photographs, testimonies and objects and gradually restoring lost stories to collective memory.

Renewed care for Jewish heritage

In recent decades, interest in Jewish heritage in Slovenia has grown considerably.

The restoration of the synagogue in Lendava, research into the history of the Jews of Prekmurje, commemorative ceremonies, exhibitions and scholarly publications have all contributed to a better understanding of the Jewish contribution to the development of the region.

The Jewish Cultural Centre Ljubljana, the Jewish Museum of Slovenia and the Liberal Jewish Community of Slovenia also play an important role in ensuring that the history of the Jews of Prekmurje does not remain confined to archives but becomes part of the public historical memory of Slovenia. Their work is supported by numerous researchers in Slovenia and abroad.

Conclusion

Jewish life in Prekmurje was never restored after 1945. The community that had helped shape the economic, cultural and religious character of the region for almost two centuries had been reduced by the Holocaust to such a small number that it could no longer sustain communal life.

Its heritage, however, did not disappear. It survives in the synagogue of Lendava, in Jewish cemeteries, archival documents, family photographs, the memories of survivors and an expanding body of research. Every new exhibition, book or commemorative ceremony represents a further step in restoring names and stories to people who were absent from Slovenia’s historical memory for far too long.

The synagogue in Murska Sobota

Lipót Baumhorn and the fate of a lost Jewish centre

The history of the Jewish community in Murska Sobota was closely connected with places of prayer, assembly and communal life. Three historic synagogues or prayer spaces can be identified in the town. The first known synagogue was arranged in Kučan’s house, a simple eighteenth-century Pannonian building at today’s Zvezna ulica 10. The site is now occupied by the Murska Sobota Regional and Study Library. This early prayer room reflects a period when the Jewish community was still relatively small, yet already sufficiently organised to require a permanent place for worship and gathering.

The second synagogue is first mentioned in 1853. It can also be identified on the Franciscan cadastre of 1860, where a smaller building belonging to the Jewish community is marked. It measured approximately 8 by 12 metres and could accommodate around eighty seats. In size, it was comparable to the first phase of the synagogue in Lendava before its later renovation. This building expressed the development of the community in the nineteenth century, when Jews in Prekmurje became increasingly integrated into the economic and social life of the town.

Although the number of Jews in Murska Sobota declined from the beginning of the twentieth century, the economic strength of the community increased. The old synagogue was in poor condition, and its restoration no longer seemed worthwhile. The community therefore decided to build a new, representative synagogue. In 1907 the commission was entrusted to Lipót Baumhorn, one of the most important and prolific synagogue architects in Central Europe. The new synagogue was built between 1907 and 1908.

Lipót Baumhorn, born in 1860 in Kisbér, Hungary, was an architect of Jewish origin. He studied in Vienna under Heinrich von Ferstel and later worked in Budapest between 1884 and 1894 for Ödön Lechner, one of the key figures in the formation of Hungarian national architecture. Baumhorn was initially inspired by Lechner’s search for a distinct Hungarian architectural language, but later moved away from folkloric elements and developed a style suitable for a wide range of Jewish communities, from more traditional to more liberal ones.

Baumhorn designed twenty-five synagogues and restored many others across the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. He worked in Budapest, in provincial towns of Hungary and in areas that are today part of Slovakia, Romania and the former Yugoslavia. Among his important works are the synagogues in Rijeka, Zrenjanin, Szeged, Novi Sad, Budapest, Cegléd, Gyöngyös and Murska Sobota. His style combined Romanesque, Gothic, Oriental, Art Nouveau and occasionally Moorish elements. Despite this variety of influences, his synagogues often share a recognisable plan: an almost square prayer hall, a central dome or emphasised central space, women’s galleries, staircases in the corners, a bimah or reading platform in front of the Torah ark, and a richly designed setting for the Torah.

The Murska Sobota synagogue was a brick building with walls 45 centimetres thick. Its external dimensions were 13.7 by 23.7 metres. The ground plan included the main prayer hall, a small rectangular extension to the east for the Torah ark, a rounded south-eastern corner and a western entrance vestibule. The single-nave sanctuary had a shallow vault and was surrounded on three sides by a women’s gallery. This gallery rested on elaborately shaped stone pillars, which also supported the ceiling. The bimah, enclosed by a wrought-iron fence, stood in front of the raised Torah ark, placed in a richly designed niche flanked by two pillars. This arrangement was characteristic of Neolog synagogues in Hungary, where the liturgical space approached the form of a modern and representative sacred hall.

Inside there were eighteen wooden pews on the ground floor with 126 seats, as well as two smaller pews on both sides of the entrance with an additional twelve seats. Two further pews stood beside the bimah, providing eight more seats; altogether there were 146 seats for men. The women’s gallery contained 108 seats. Above the Torah ark, in the eastern part of the gallery, stood the organ, another feature characteristic of Neolog Jewish worship. The interior was painted by Lajos Rábai from Keszthely.

Architecturally, the synagogue combined historicist styles with modern Art Nouveau accents. Baumhorn often used forms related to Hungarian national architecture around the turn of the century, interweaving Romanesque, Gothic, Oriental and Secessionist elements. The Murska Sobota synagogue was more modest than his largest projects, yet it clearly bore his signature: an articulated façade, an emphasised main entrance, a rhythmic arrangement of windows, a richly designed prayer hall and a carefully positioned bimah near the Torah ark.

The main façade had three pointed-arch entrances. The side doors led to the women’s galleries, reached by two wooden staircases in the vestibule. Above the main entrance was a large round window, while the vertical axis of the façade ended with the motif of the Tablets of the Law. Similar motifs appeared on the side façades, where narrow round-arched windows replaced the doors. The entire building was covered in rough yellowish-grey plaster, accented with rustication. On the eastern façade there was a large rose window with the Star of David, marking from the outside the position of the Torah ark within.

During the Second World War the synagogue was abandoned and desecrated, though not directly damaged. After liberation in 1945, religious services were no longer held there. The Red Army used the building as a stable for around sixty horses, which in itself indicates its size. The remaining Jews were impoverished, and the community had no funds for restoration. Part of the furnishings was sold: carpets, benches, two crystal chandeliers and the organ. Some items had already been sold before the war to the Evangelical church in Selo. The main wooden door of the synagogue was taken by the construction company Sograd and built into its stables; today it is exhibited in the Murska Sobota Regional Museum.

Before the Second World War, the synagogue in Murska Sobota had been the seat of the entire Jewish community and the strongest symbol of Jewish presence in Prekmurje. After the war, however, the surviving Jews were left without social influence or historical recognition. In 1949 the Federation of Jewish Communities in Belgrade sold the synagogue to the Town People’s Committee. When the Pentecostal church in Veščica asked for permission to borrow the building, the authorities delayed their response and transferred the matter to the religious commission of the People’s Republic of Slovenia, which showed no interest in resolving it. The Town People’s Committee of Murska Sobota then decided to demolish the synagogue and build an apartment block on the site.

The demolition was scheduled for 21 April 1954. The official reason given was a shortage of housing, although the building could easily have been adapted for various public or other uses. There were also many empty plots of land in the town available for new construction, so the claim that the synagogue had to be removed was largely an excuse. Its destruction meant the loss of the central Jewish monument in Murska Sobota and one of the most important architectural testimonies to Jewish history in Slovenia.

In 1956 an apartment block designed by architect Feri Novak was built on the site. In the town’s memory it became known as the “Jewish Block”. It is a five-storey cube-like building with a flat roof. Natural stone was used on the lower parts of the façade, and some material from the demolished synagogue was reused in the structure. Thus the memory of the synagogue remained present only indirectly: in the name of the block, in a few preserved objects, in photographs and in building material that passed from a sacred space into residential architecture.

Feri Novak, the architect of the block, did not oppose the demolition of the synagogue. He had trained under Peter Behrens in Vienna and later under Le Corbusier in Paris. In Murska Sobota, both before and after the Second World War, he left a strong mark through functionalist and modernist architecture. He was involved in the urban planning of the town and designed several public buildings. In 1947 or 1948 he also designed a memorial plaque and obelisk at the municipal cemetery, dedicated to the victims of the war, but without specific mention of Jewish victims.

The story of the Murska Sobota synagogue is therefore a story of growth, cultural confidence, destruction and erasure. It was the work of one of the most important synagogue architects in Central Europe, the centre of religious and communal life for the Jews of Prekmurje, and an expression of their position in the town at the beginning of the twentieth century. Its post-war fate reveals how quickly a place of memory can become a place of forgetting. The synagogue no longer exists, but its history remains an essential part of Jewish, Prekmurje and Slovenian cultural heritage.

The Lendava synagogue

The Jewish community of Lendava began to take shape in the second half of the 18th century, when the Jewish population in the town and its surrounding settlements had grown large enough to require its own religious organisation. The community also included families from nearby villages such as Dolga vas, Petišovci, Trimlini, Dolina, Banuta and settlements in what is today Hungary.

The first place of prayer was arranged in the private house of Bódog Weisz on today’s Glavna ulica. In 1837 the community was officially established, and soon afterwards a prayer hall was opened on Spodnja ulica. It had around thirty seats for men and twenty for women. In the mid-19th century, the community moved to a brick building on the site of the later synagogue. In 1844 Aron Fischauer became rabbi of Lendava, and during his time the community began keeping official registers, which continued uninterrupted until 1944.

The present synagogue was built in the 1860s, during the time of Rabbi Moses Schacherles. The construction partly incorporated an older brick structure, which explains the building’s simple and restrained architectural character. In size, it belonged among the smaller synagogues of the former Hungarian lands. It could accommodate around eighty men and sixty women.

The building has a rectangular ground plan, a hipped roof and a modest exterior, although its height made it stand out among the surrounding single-storey houses. The interior was arranged according to the reformed type of Jewish worship. The women’s gallery extended along the western and longitudinal sides of the prayer hall and was supported by cast-iron columns with Corinthian capitals. On the eastern side stood the aron hakodesh, the Torah ark, and in front of it the bimah, the reading platform. Above the sacred space burned the eternal light, ner tamid, symbolising the Divine Presence.

In 1908 the synagogue was enlarged and renovated. An entrance hall with a staircase was added, window openings were reshaped, and the building was adapted to the needs of the community. Despite its modest exterior, the interior followed a clear liturgical axis and a carefully organised spatial arrangement.

The Second World War brought the end of organised Jewish life in Lendava. In April 1944 the Jews of Lendava were gathered, taken to Čakovec, then to Nagykanizsa, and from there deported to concentration camps. Most were murdered in Auschwitz. Only a small number of survivors returned to Lendava after the war; many later emigrated because of the nationalisation of property and the destruction of communal life.

After the war the synagogue was abandoned and desecrated. Some elements of the interior survived, including the cast-iron columns, the railing of the women’s gallery and the wall clock, while the Torah ark and the bimah were lost. For a long time the building was neglected and used as a warehouse; an additional entrance was even opened through the eastern wall.

Between 1992 and 2002 the synagogue was restored. Today it serves as an exhibition and memorial space dedicated to the Jewish history of Lendava and Prekmurje. The women’s gallery houses a permanent exhibition on the Jewish heritage of the region, while the ground floor is used for cultural events and artistic presentations. The building also displays works by the Israeli artist Dan Reisinger, born in Serbia, who donated to Lendava his graphic cycle entitled Fiery Scrolls.

The Lendava Synagogue is one of the few preserved synagogues in Slovenia. Its architecture is modest, but its historical significance is profound. It bears witness to a community that shaped the economic, religious and cultural life of the town for more than a century, and to the violent rupture brought by the Holocaust. Today it is a place of memory, silence and cultural encounter.

The synagogue in Beltinci

The Jewish community of Beltinci had its own synagogue before 1860. It stood in the area of today’s Mladinska ulica, close to Panonska ulica and the Črnec stream. Though modest in size, it was of great importance to the local community: a place of prayer, festivals, learning and gathering for Jewish families from Beltinci and the surrounding area.

Architecturally, the synagogue was a simple rectangular building, measuring approximately nine by five metres. It had a four-sided roof and belonged to the group of smaller synagogues of the Pannonian-Hungarian cultural sphere. Its eastern façade faced the street and contained a semicircular window, which illuminated the interior and marked the direction of the aron kodesh, the sacred cabinet for the Torah scrolls. The entrance faced the nearby Črnec stream.

The interior was modest but carefully arranged. On the western side, a staircase led to the women’s gallery. This gallery extended along both longitudinal walls and consisted of two green-painted balconies. The benches in the prayer hall were also painted green, arranged in two rows and oriented towards the eastern wall. Above the sacred area was a semicircular window bearing the symbol of the Star of David.

The last rabbi active in the area was Adolf Kaufmann, who died in 1907. After his death, organised religious life began to decline. According to local tradition, in the 1920s — partly as a consequence of anti-Jewish violence and pogroms — a significant part, or possibly the entire Orthodox Jewish community of Beltinci, emigrated to Palestine. This departure marked a turning point in the history of the town: the synagogue lost its worshippers, communal life faded, and the building was left without regular use.

The synagogue was damaged during anti-Jewish unrest and deteriorated rapidly afterwards. In 1937 it was demolished because of disuse, the inactivity of the community and the absence of a permanent local rabbi. Its destruction meant the disappearance of one of the most important material witnesses to Jewish presence in Beltinci.

Yet part of its heritage has survived. The Jewish Cultural Center Ljubljana preserves in its collection two ner tamid lamps – two eternal lights from the Beltinci synagogue. These rare and precious objects once burned before the aron kodesh; today they are silent witnesses to the former sacred space. The two preserved eternal lights carry a special meaning: they are not only museum objects, but symbols of memory, prayer, community and the lost synagogue.

A new chapter in the understanding of Jewish heritage in Beltinci opened in 2026, when mikvaot, Jewish ritual baths, were discovered in the town. Their discovery shows that Jewish life in Beltinci was connected not only with the synagogue as a place of worship, but also with everyday religious practice, ritual purity and the broader organisation of communal life. The mikvaot are an exceptional testimony to the deeper and more developed presence of the Jewish community in the town.

The synagogue in Beltinci was small in scale, but great in significance. Its story speaks of the life and disappearance of a community, of violence, emigration and oblivion, but also of preserved traces that today allow the Jewish history of Prekmurje to be read anew. The two eternal lights and the discovery of the mikvaot remind us that the heritage of the Jews of Beltinci has not been erased: it remains present in objects, places, memory and research.

Dr Lazar Roth

The last rabbi of Slovenia before the Holocaust

Dr Lazar Roth, born in 1877 in Jelšava, today in Slovakia, was the last rabbi of the Jewish community of Murska Sobota and one of the most significant figures of Jewish life in Prekmurje before the Second World War. He arrived in Murska Sobota in 1926, after spending several years in Belgrade and Novi Sad, and lived in the rabbi’s house behind the synagogue. His arrival marked an important period in the life of a community with a long tradition of religious, educational and charitable activity.

Roth was far more than a religious functionary. He was a scholar, teacher, orator and man of broad European learning. His private library was renowned for its richness; within it he also taught children and helped transmit Jewish knowledge to younger generations. He mastered many languages, preached in several of them and was known for the power of his speech. His sermons were so respected that members of other faiths occasionally attended them as well. Between 1926 and 1941 he also taught religion in local secondary schools in Murska Sobota, and until the war he also led a Sunday school for Jewish children in Ljubljana. In this way, his educational and religious work extended beyond the local community and connected Jewish life in different parts of Slovenia.

As antisemitism, fascism and Nazism spread across Europe, Roth remained with his community. He understood the danger that threatened the Jews, yet he did not leave Murska Sobota. His life therefore became inseparable from the fate of the Jews of Murska Sobota and Prekmurje.

In April 1944, the Hungarian authorities, who controlled Prekmurje during the war, began the deportation of the Jewish population. On 26 April 1944, the Jews of Murska Sobota were ordered to gather in the synagogue, allowed to bring only personal luggage. They were held there overnight, and the following morning they were transported via Čakovec to Nagykanizsa, a collecting camp before deportation to Auschwitz. From there they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where almost the entire Jewish community of Murska Sobota was destroyed.

Dr Lazar Roth was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. With his death, not only an individual life came to an end, but also an era of organised rabbinic leadership in Murska Sobota. His fate symbolises the violent rupture of Jewish religious, cultural and educational continuity in Prekmurje.

Today, his memory is also preserved through books. In the Regional and Study Library of Murska Sobota, a Jewish collection of prayer and ritual books has been catalogued; these volumes most likely belonged to the former Jewish religious congregation of Murska Sobota. The collection includes prayer books, festival machzorim, Haggadot and manuals for reading and performing prayers. Some of the books bear the signatures of Jews from Murska Sobota, including Rabbi Lazar Roth. This written heritage is one of the few surviving material traces of a world almost entirely destroyed in the Holocaust.

Lazar Roth remains in historical memory as the last rabbi of Murska Sobota, as a teacher and as a guardian of his community in its darkest hour. His story speaks of learning, responsibility and loyalty, but also of the loss that marked the whole of Prekmurje. To remember him is to remember the people, books, prayers, voices and lives that were violently erased — and must not be forgotten.

Jewish cuisine in Prekmurje

Jewish cuisine in Prekmurje was far more than a collection of recipes. It was a way of life in which religion, family memory, the local environment and the festive calendar were closely intertwined. Its foundation was kashrut, Jewish dietary law, which regulated permitted foods, the preparation of meat and the separation of meat and dairy dishes. Food therefore gave everyday life a particular order: the kitchen, utensils, cooking methods and the festive table were all part of religious and cultural identity.

The Jews of Prekmurje lived in a region where Hungarian, Pannonian, Slovenian and Central European influences met. Their cuisine was therefore both Jewish and deeply local. They used ingredients available in their surroundings: potatoes, cabbage, onions, beans, lentils, eggs, fish, poultry, goose meat, fruit, walnuts, poppy seeds, honey and seasonal vegetables. Their menus included soups, raisin and chestnut sauces, compotes, dumplings, sarma, roasted poultry, fish dishes, pasta and festive pastries. This mixture shows that Jewish cuisine in Prekmurje was not isolated; it developed in constant dialogue with its surroundings while preserving its religious rules.

Shabbat, the weekly day of rest, held a special place. Since ordinary work was not permitted on Shabbat, food had to be prepared in advance. Bread, salt, wine, goose cracklings, boiled potatoes with onions and other dishes prepared before the beginning of the holy day were placed on the table. One of the most characteristic dishes was cholent — a slowly cooked stew of meat, potatoes, grains and beans. Its preparation beautifully expresses the connection between religious law and practical life: the dish was cooked slowly for many hours so that it could remain warm on the day of rest.

Festive food followed the Jewish calendar. For Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, families prepared meat soup, roasted meat, raisin and chestnut sauces, compotes, honey, fruit and braided festive bread. Sweet dishes symbolised the wish for a good and sweet year. After the fast of Yom Kippur, lighter food was eaten first, followed by soup, meat, vegetables, bread and fruit. For Sukkot, poultry soup, sarma, kindli and flodni were prepared, while Purim brought richer dishes such as soups, meat with sauces, poppy-seed and walnut sweets and hamantaschen.

For Pesach, families baked or ordered matzah, the unleavened ritual bread. In Prekmurje, matzah was also known among the non-Jewish population; in some villages it was called židulaška. The Pesach table included beetroot, potatoes, goose cracklings, baked liver, eggs, bitter herbs, fruit and nuts.

Today, the Jewish cuisine of Prekmurje is a precious memory of a community almost completely destroyed in the Holocaust. In recipes, festive dishes and family customs, the scents of home, languages, names, rituals and traces of everyday life of Jewish families from Murska Sobota, Lendava, Beltinci and other places in Prekmurje are preserved.

The Jewish cemetery in Dolga vas

The Jewish cemetery in Dolga vas is the most important preserved place of memory connected with the Jewish community of Lendava. It lies north of Lendava, beside the road leading towards the Hungarian border, and is linked to the history of Jews from Lendava and the surrounding settlements. Dolga vas, a long roadside village, is mentioned in written sources as early as the 14th century, while the Jewish cemetery most probably dates from the 19th century, when the Lendava community developed its own religious and charitable institutions.

In 1834 the Chevra Kadisha, the Jewish burial society, was founded in Lendava. Its duties included caring for the dying, preparing the deceased for burial, organising funerals and supporting mourning families. The cemetery in Dolga vas became the burial place for members of the Lendava community and Jews from the wider region.

The original cemetery was situated a short distance from the road and measured approximately 25 by 30 metres. In 1880 it was enlarged and surrounded by a stone wall, parts of which are still preserved in the overgrown rear section of the cemetery. The entrance leads through a ceremonial hall, built in 1906. A memorial plaque records that the building was erected during the presidency of Jakab Schwarz of the Chevra Kadisha, under the supervision of community representatives and the construction committee.

The ceremonial hall is a simple, almost square building with a hipped roof. Its architecture is modest but clearly functional. The façades contain arched openings, while inside two memorial plaques are preserved: one commemorating the construction of the hall and another connected with the Jewish cemetery in Beltinci. Above the entrance is a stone panel with a bilingual inscription. The Hebrew text refers to the biblical vision of the prophet Ezekiel, the valley of dry bones and the promise of renewed life.

The cemetery is divided into several sections. The central area was reserved for members of the Chevra Kadisha, together with their wives and unmarried daughters. Next to it lies the general burial area, while a smaller fenced section was dedicated to children’s graves. Today 191 graves are recorded, including the memorial to the Jewish victims of the Second World War from Prekmurje.

The Holocaust memorial was moved here from the cemetery in Beltinci in 1947. Its installation was initiated by four Jewish survivors who remained in Prekmurje after the war. The white marble monument, marked by the image of a cut-off tree, symbolises lives violently interrupted and the destruction of a community. The inscription commemorates the victims of fascism between 1941 and 1945.

The last two Jewish burials during the Second World War took place in 1943, when Henrik Maschanzker and Armin, or Herman, Strasser were buried. After the war, funerals were mostly non-religious because there was no local rabbi. The last person buried in the Jewish cemetery of Dolga vas was Lajos Blau, a Holocaust survivor who remained in Lendava after the war and died there in 1998 at an advanced age.

The tombstone inscriptions are mainly in Hebrew and Hungarian, with only a few in German. The older tombstones are mostly made of limestone, with arched or pointed tops, and are modest in form. Later monuments are larger, often made of black marble, with gilded inscriptions and more elaborate decoration. These differences reflect the changing economic position of Jewish families and the influence of bourgeois taste at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

The Jewish cemetery in Dolga vas is more than a burial ground. It is an archive in stone — a place of names, languages, family ties and interrupted lives. It brings together religious tradition, local history and the memory of a community that left a deep mark on Lendava and Prekmurje. Today it remains one of the strongest material testimonies to the Jewish presence in this region.

Interesting Jews from Prekmurje

Ali Kardoš

Poet, translator and revolutionary from Murska Sobota

Ali Kardoš, born Aladar Kardoš in 1914 in Murska Sobota, belonged to a generation of young Jews from Prekmurje who came of age during a period of profound political, social and ideological upheaval between the two world wars. He was born into a modest merchant family dealing in hardware. After his father died during the First World War, his mother was left to run the shop and raise three children on her own. The family lived in a one-storey house on the corner of today’s Ulica arhitekta Novaka and Partizanska ulica in Murska Sobota. Today an apartment block named after Kardoš stands on the site, with a memorial plaque on its façade commemorating his role in the communist movement.

Kardoš was one of the early figures of the communist and revolutionary movement in Prekmurje. He joined a circle of young culturally and politically engaged people known as the Mladoprekmurci, who distributed communist literature and publications of the Comintern, the international association of communist parties. He was not only a political activist, but also a poet and translator. His work brought together social criticism, literary expression and the search for a more just world at a time when authoritarian ideologies, social tensions and antisemitism were gaining strength across Europe.

Already during his secondary-school years, his views brought him into conflict with the authorities. He was banned from continuing his education within the Drava Banovina and therefore moved to Čakovec, where he trained as a shop assistant. There he also encountered various Zionist ideas, which broadened his understanding of the Jewish question, political futures and the position of minorities in Central Europe. After returning to Murska Sobota, he worked for a time in the family shop and later found employment in a linen factory. There, too, he spread communist ideas among the workers, which eventually cost him his job.

In 1933 he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia and became secretary of the first communist party organisation in Prekmurje. The following year he attended a regional conference of the Slovenian communist party in Goričane, where he met Josip Broz Tito, later president of Yugoslavia, and Edvard Kardelj, one of the leading political figures of socialist Yugoslavia. Because of his political convictions and activities, Kardoš was repeatedly imprisoned, as communist activity in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was prohibited and persecuted.

In 1940 he was arrested and sent to the political prisoners’ camp in Bileća, Bosnia. His persecution did not end after his release. During the war he was imprisoned by the German occupation authorities in Murska Sobota and later by the Hungarian authorities. In 1942 he was forced into a group of Jewish labourers assigned to hard manual labour in Hungary. In 1943 he was sent to forced labour in the Bor mine in Serbia, and from there deported to the Flossenbürg concentration camp in Germany, where he died in 1945.

The life of Ali Kardoš brings together several layers of Prekmurje’s history: the Jewish presence in Murska Sobota, the workers’ and revolutionary movements between the wars, political repression, and the destruction of European Jewry during the Holocaust. He was a young intellectual whose social sensitivity found expression in political activism, literature and translation. His fate bears witness to a time in which personal conviction, Jewish identity and the violence of totalitarian systems became tragically intertwined.

dr. Sándor Vályi

Murska Sobota (Muraszombat), late 19th century – Flossenbürg, 1944

Dr. Sándor Vályi, born Sándor Weiner to Jakob and Francziska (Fani) Fischer, was a lawyer, poet, and one of the most prominent figures of the Jewish community in Murska Sobota in the first half of the 20th century. After studying law in Budapest, he settled in Murska Sobota, where he established a legal practice and became part of the urban intellectual elite. His office was first located on what is now Slovenska Street, later moving to Štefan Kovač Street, where he built a villa in 1907 that served both as his residence and workplace.

As a lawyer, he represented major landowners in the region, including Count László Szapáry, and was involved in legal matters related to agrarian reform. Among his trainees were Dr. Ludvik Rogan and Štefan Kovač-Marko, later a national hero. He served as an officer in the First World War and, in the 1920s, as a devout Jew, became president of the Jewish community in Murska Sobota.

In 1910, he married Elizabeta Ascher in the local synagogue. She came from a prominent Jewish family that later adopted the surname Árvay. Their only son, Imre (Emerik, Emery, Mirko; 1911–1998), studied in Zurich before emigrating to the United States, where he became a highly successful innovator with more than 200 patents. Among his achievements was the development of the soft two-liter plastic bottle for Pepsi-Cola, which became widely used in the global beverage industry.

Dr. Vályi also wrote poetry in Hungarian. In 2018, a selection of his poems was published in Slovenian translation under the title From a Distant Land, translated by Bishop Jožef Smej, bringing his literary legacy back to light after more than a century.

Although he avoided the first wave of arrests of Jews in Prekmurje in April 1944 due to his earlier services to Hungary, he and his wife were arrested in November of the same year. They were deported to the Flossenbürg concentration camp, where Dr. Vályi was executed in November 1944. His wife survived but never returned to Murska Sobota, instead joining their son in the United States, where she died in 1977.

His life—from a respected lawyer, community leader, and poet to a victim of the Holocaust—stands as a powerful testimony to the fate of the Jewish community in Prekmurje and to a world that was almost entirely destroyed during the Second World War.

Judita Hahn Kreft (1926–2020)

Judita Hahn (1926–2020), a Slovenian stage and film actress of Jewish origin from Prekmurje, was an important figure in Slovenia’s 20th-century cultural life. She was born in Murska Sobota into a Jewish family, and her youth was interrupted by the Second World War, when she was deported to Auschwitz—an გამოცდილthat marked her life permanently.

After the war, she studied acting and in 1952 became a member of the Ljubljana City Theatre (Mestno gledališče ljubljansko), where she remained for more than three decades. On stage, she established herself as a remarkable character actress, known for her psychological depth and subtle interpretative strength. Among her notable performances were roles in plays by William Shakespeare, Ivan Cankar, Tennessee Williams, and Jean Giraudoux, as well as in works by contemporary European playwrights. She particularly excelled in portraying strong, internally complex female characters.

In addition to theatre, she also appeared in film and television. Among her notable film roles was her performance in Druga stran medalje (“The Other Side of the Medal”), and she participated in numerous television dramas and radio plays, where her voice became widely recognized.

She was married to the playwright and director Bratko Kreft, with whom she significantly contributed to Slovenian theatre. Her artistry went beyond the interpretation of roles—her performances carried a profound human experience, a quiet strength, and the dignity of survival.

As a Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust and as an artist who left a lasting mark on Slovenian theatre, Judita Hahn represents a vital link between the Jewish heritage of Prekmurje and Slovenia’s modern cultural history. Her life and work bear witness to the power of art to preserve memory and give voice to even the most difficult experiences.