Zagreb Jews most often called the synagogue a temple. Even those who were not religious visited the temple on the High Holidays (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) and on Shabbat (Friday evenings and Saturday mornings). Women and men sat separately: women above the central area, on the balcony, while men sat in the lower part, where the Aron ha-kodesh (holy ark) with the Torah scrolls was located. Since the synagogue was Neolog and belonged to a well-to-do community, it also had an organ. Seats were leased every year, and having the best seats was a symbol of prestige.
Listen to how Zdenka Novak remembers the synagogue in the excerpt of the interview. Read her short biography.
Zdenka Novak was born in Zagreb in 1919 in the Steiner family. Father Lavoslav Steiner (Osijek, 1889 – Jasenovac, 1941) in the interwar period was the majority owner of the company Lavoslav Steiner, a wholesale paper and cardboard store, the largest paper and cardboard wholesaler in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. He was active in the Jewish religious community in Zagreb and a member of B’nei Brit and Maccabi. He was involved in helping refugees from Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria before the Second World War. Novak describes a carefree childhood spent in an affluent acculturated family, schooling, as well as various ideological aspirations within Jewish youth. He describes his parents' getting more and more involved in Zionism, caused by the rise of antisemitism in Europe, as well as his personal commitment to left-wing political ideas. Just before the war, she married Miroslav Brichta, also a left-leaning Jew from Zagreb. Brichta was killed in the camp on Pag. After the war, she married Zvonko Mattersdorfer, so after the wedding they changed their name to Novak, which symbolized a new beginning.