Les Juifs de Bratislava (Pressbourg)

Pressburg (Bratislava), long the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary under the Habsburgs, was one of the great centers of Ashkenazic Talmudic scholarship, marked by the yeshivah led in the early nineteenth century by Moses Sofer, known as the Hatam Sofer, a major figure in the defense of Orthodoxy against reforms. The community, anchored in an ancient Jewish quarter, was a stronghold of Central European Orthodoxy and retained considerable religious weight. In the twentieth century, after the creation of Czechoslovakia, it participated in modern communal life. Under the collaborationist Slovak State, from 1942 onward, Jews were deported to the Nazi extermination camps; the community was decimated, and only a minority survived.

Sources & resources

• The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe ↗
• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan