Lubina Jewish Cemetery

There was a Jewish cemetery in Lubina with about 40 graves. The territory of the former Jewish cemetery is now part of a private garden. In this part of the former cemetery—which is inaccessible to the public, in a village called Na briežkoch—there are two big, beautiful gravestones made of black granite. The inscriptions display the names of the Deutsch and Plesz families. The other gravestones were stolen by the locals over the years. Besides the two stones, there is nothing else which marks the cemetery. The cemetery’s establishment date nor the year in which it was last used is known.

According to the Lubina property registry, the first Jews settled in the village in 1830. At the end of World War I (WWI), all the Jews living in the village were expelled by the locals just before the Czechoslovak republic was founded. Other locals considered the Jews to be loyal to the defeated Hungarian Kingdom. The locals also took revenge on the Jews for usury during WWI when Jews, who were shop and pub owners, sold sugar, salt, wheat, alcohol, and petroleum at very high prices. The expelled Jews moved to the nearby town of Nové Mesto nad Váhom which for centuries was a centre for Jewish commercial, cultural, and religious life and was the second biggest community in the former Kingdom of Hungary. They were granted the rights and privileges granted to local Jews by King Belo IV in the 13th century.

There was a synagogue in the village, which was later destroyed, and a cultural centre was built in its place in 1935. During World War II, local villagers helped to hide Jews. The Klimo family from the village was honoured by Israel as Righteous among the Nations and was visited several times by the Israeli delegation led by descendants of the famous rabbi Dr. Aba-Armin Frieder, who was the rabbi in Nové Mesto nad Váhom. As part of the local resistance partisan group Hurban, led by Miloš Uher two well-known Jews fought against the Nazi occupation and the local Slovak fascist regimes: Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Israel Wetzler. They succeeded in escaping from Auschwitz and wrote the “Auschwitz Report”—an eyewitness account of the mass killings organized by the Nazis in the death camp which became known world-wide during the war. After writing the report, they joined an above-ground resistance group. Rudolf Vrba was an interpreter for German, Russian, English, and Polish and Alfréd Israel Wetzler was the group’s doctor. Commemorative stones were unveiled in the village in 2007 in their honour. There is no Jewish community in Lubina today.