Pig in the Shul
I doubted that the rabbi would have approved of a prosciutto bagel being consumed in front of the synagogue’s ark. He might not have approved of the heavily tattooed waitress delivering it to the eager female customer sitting in the mens’ section. At least it wasn’t a Saturday. Although the ‘Synagoga Cafe,’ a cafe housed in a former orthodox synagogue, was open during the holy day of rest.
Trnava, a town roughly half an hour from Slovakia’s capital of Bratislava, houses two synagogues for today’s practically nonexistent Jewish community. As a result the two synagogues, on opposite sides of the street, serve alternate purposes. There is a Neolog synagogue of neo-byzantine style with two onion-domed towers facing the street. It is currently used as an art gallery though you can still tour the old building.
There is also a simpler, cream and pale green structure that, aside from the two stone commandments at the top of the main face of the building, could from the outside be mistaken for just another hall. Today the building has been transformed into the aforementioned cafe. Whilst not used for its original purpose, given the small number of Jews in the area it’s unlikely the building would still exist if not used as a cafe. The larger, more significant Neolog synagogue in Bratislava managed to survive the war but was destroyed during communist rule so that a bridge could be built.
The transformation of the synagogue into a cafe means that the heritage of the building is maintained. Whilst pale and understated on the outside, inside the building the old-world charm of an eastern European synagogue is felt. Blue Stars of David adorn a maroon ceiling with a central candelabra hanging down over the raised platform that used to function as the synagogue’s bimah. Rows of pews that would have housed parishioners have been replaced by cafe tables and lounge seating but the many bookcases crammed with Slovak literature are reminiscent of the building’s former function as a house of learning. The latticed wooden frame sitting over the upper balcony’s balustrade separating the women from the men still remains, despite women now being allowed to sit in the downstairs mens’ section.
My visit to the cafe assured me that European Jewish paraphernalia can, through gentrification, be rebranded as chic. With a name like ‘Synagoga Cafe’ I expected, through an egregious stereotype, that I’d find a kosher restaurant with unfriendly staff, cold soup and lengthy wait times. But instead the cafe seems to be the hippest coffee house in town for both Jews and Gentiles alike. This discovery has cemented in my mind my plans to convert St Peter’s Basilica into a revolving gefilte fish buffet restaurant.
