Physical
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[1], 41, [26, 67 blank] ff., 246:198 mm., light age staining, ink on heavy stock, beautifully illustrated title, crisp edges, colored endpapers, bound in contemporary full calf over boards, tooled in gild, front inner seam split. |
Detailed
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Register of members in the Hesed Ne'arim group of Varpalota or Palota as it is referred to in Jewish literature. Today it is part of Budapest. A Jew was first mentioned in 1542, whose profession was coining money, but real Jews settlement began at the beginning of the eighteenth century, under the auspices of the Zichy noble family who owned Varpalota more than 200 years, since 1650. The first Jews arrived there from Austria, after Kaiser Charles III expelled them. In 1848 the right to settle in Varpalota was given to the municipal council, and taken from the landlord. It transferred the right to settle to the Jewish community.
The majority of the Jews of Varpalota were merchants and tenants, who rented shops and butcher shops. Some were peddlers of all kinds of agricultural products. In the second half of the nineteenth century, railroads which connected villages and towns. This made the farmers need the merchandise of the Jews of Varpalota less. Many of the local Jews moved to other cities, but when a coal mine was opened there, the importance of the place grew, and the number of Jews grew with it.
According to local Jewish tradition, the founding of the mine is connected with the halachic answers of the rabbi of Varpalota, R. Abraham Singer. He called on the local authorities to note that there was a spring called Szenhely, which means “a place of coal.” Local attitudes to Jews were usually positive, and they were supported whenever the landlords or their representatives persecuted them.
There was an official document from 1831, which pointed out that the local Jews didn't cause harm to the city, but the opposite. They were useful as renters of apartments, or clever merchants who supplied goods to the place, taking only a small profit, and also as taxpayers. The Jews rewarded their non-Jewish neighbors as well as they could several times. When a plague broke out the Jews established a hospital, which served the whole city, and when the church bells wee injured by fire in 1860, the Jews collected money to restore them. It had a Hevra Kadisha, which was established in the first half of the nineteenth century, a Women's Association, and a society for helping poor Jews, established in 1890. It also had a yeshiva and Talmud Torah, established in 1850.
The synagogue was built in the middle of the eighteenth century. When the building became too cramped for everyone to pray in it, a glorious building was built. It was opened in 1840, in the presence of representative of church, district, and municipal authorities, a very rare phenomenon in this era in Hungary. The elementary Jewish school was established about the time of the construction of the first synagogue. In 1786 the school had a building of its own. In 1840 there were two teachers in it, Hungarian and German.
In Varpalota there were a few famous scholars-rabbis. Of them we shall mention R. Israel Ben -Yehuda Leib (1782-1808). During his time in office the majority of community institutions were established. He composed the community and burial society regulations, following the rules of the Prague community. R. Pesah Singer (1816–1898), a student and disciple R. Moses Sofer in Pressburg, was appointed rabbi of Varpalota in 1846 and served till 1871 when he moved to Kirchdorf (Szepesujfalu). He was renowned as a talmudist, and R. A.B.S. Sofer, author of the Ketav Sofer, said wittily of him "there is no 'Second Pesah' in our times." He was an assiduous student all his life and used to study standing, garbed in tallit and tefillin. |
