Huncovce

History

==History== Huncovce was first mentioned in 1257 as a farming settlement, the property of Hungarian noblemen. German craftsmen and lumberjacks later settled there, and the town received rights to become a city. At the beginning of the 19th century, about half of the residents were Jews, and the rest Christian Germans and Slovaks, who were generally either Lutheran or Catholic. The village belonged to a German language island. Before the establishment of independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, Huncovce was part of Szepes County within the Kingdom of Hungary. From 1939 to 1945, it was part of the Slovak Republic. On 28 January 1945, the Red Army dislodged the Wehrmacht from Huncovce in the course of the Western Carpathian offensive and it was once again part of Czechoslovakia. The German population was expelled in 1945. The first Jews to reside in Huncovce were from Moravia, settling there in the latter half of the 16th century. Later, survivors of the Khmelnitsky pogroms of 1648-1649 arrived, essentially as refugees. Jewish settlement in the region was technically prohibited by law, and therefore nearly all Jews in the Spis region resided in or around Huncovce during this period. The community continued to grow through the 18th and into the 19th century; though it remained small with only 30 families in the 18th century, by 1828 it had grown to 939 members (though this did include Jews from several other nearby settlements and villages). In the 19th century, Huncovce became an important regional centre of Torah learning, and a renowned yeshiva, where in the mid-century up to 350 boys studied, was built and led by Rabbi Yechezkel Wolf Segel. In the interbellum period, the Jewish population had begun to dwindle; by 1919, there were fewer than 275 Jews remaining (the…