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 Evangelical and Catholic.[2] The village belonged to a German language island. 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 entire community, including non-Jews, numbered less than 500 at this time). During this period, most of the Jews made a living in commerce and small business (e.g., grocers and butchers), and some tradesmen (e.g., tailors and carpenters).
WWII and the Holocaust essentially put an end to Jewish life in Huncovce. On March 14 and 15, 1939, many of the German residents of the village (who had joined Nazi organizations) rounded up about 200 Jews and drove them out of the village to the no-man's land on the Slovakian-Hungarian border. They were held without shelter and in cramped and difficult conditions for two weeks, after which they were allowed to return to their homes. Two years later, the Jews' businesses were expropriated from them by Nazis and collaborators, with the young men sent to perform forced labour. Deportations began in 1942, with most Jews sent to concentration camps and extermination camps, though some were sent to Lublin-area ghettoes. Some hid in the forests, alone or with Slovaks – some of these were able to return to the village after the war, but the Jewish community could not rebuild its social structure, and its community buildings were damaged.
Today no Jewish community exists, but the local government declared the remaining cemetery a protected historical site, and the yeshiva building still stands.[3]
