Krnov Synagogue

The Krnov Synagogue stopped to be used for religious services in autumn 1938, when the Sudetenland was incorporated into Nazi Germany. Not long afterwards, on 9 November 1938, almost all synagogues in the surrounding towns – as anywhere in Nazi Germany – were destroyed during the Reichskristallnacht prosecution.

However, the synagogue was saved. End of October 1938, the mayor of Krnov, Oskar König, had received a secret order from Berlin to destroy and burn down the synagogue of his town on 9 November. Unwilling to comply, he summoned a meeting of the councillors and informed them about the order he had received. The Sudeten councillors then unanimously accepted the proposal of the builder Franz Irblich to deceive the Nazis: They decided to remove all symbols of the Jewish religion from the building and change it into a town market hall, reporting to Berlin that there was no synagogue in Jägerndorf which could be destroyed.[1] As such the building was used until the end of World War II in 1945.

After World War II the German population of Krnov was expelled and the building of the synagogue was first used as a warehouse, than as a regional archive. It was damaged during the 1997 Central European flood, two years later it was finally returned to the Jewish community in Olomouc with no Jewish community in Krnov existing anymore. Between 2003 and 2014 it was thoroughly renovated. Today, credit is given to Franz Irblich to be the savior of the synagogue also by the now Czech town of Krnov. In 1946, Irblich had received a 10 years sentence by a Czechoslovak extraordinary court after accusations of being a Nazi.[2]