The Jews of Oradea

The narrative below originates on the website  

http://www.oradeajc.com/ 

which was developed by the Lempert Family Foundation. 

 The city of Oradea, Nagyvárad in Hungarian and Grosswardein in German, is in the area of northwest Romania known as Transylvania, a few miles from the border with Hungary.

Oradea began as a Roman settlement two thousand years ago. It has been shaped by Hungarian, Turkish, Austrian, Romanian, again Hungarian and again Romanian rule, as well as periods of Nazi and Soviet occupation. It was also the destination of migrations of Germans, Jews and Roma (Gypsies). All three of its names refer to the citadel or fortress at the center of the city, there since the 1500s.

Today it is a bustling city of over one-quarter million people. About two-thirds are Romanian and one-third are Hungarian. A tiny Jewish community remains.

Oradea was once home to a large and vibrant Jewish community, before Hitler's rise and World War II. By the 1940s, of the city's 90,000 people, about 30,000 were Jewish.

Jewish people made important and lasting contributions in the arts and sciences, commerce, industry, and humanitarian service. They helped establish the city's chemical and milling industries, its transportation, communications and banking infrastructure. They played important roles in the city's medical, academic and artistic institutions.

The Jewish community of Nagyvárad, as the city was known under Hungarian rule, suffered terribly during the years of the second world war. Men between 18 and 54 years of age were taken for slave labor in the Hungarian Labor Service where many of them died. Children were barred from schools. Families were stripped of their possessions.

In the spring of 1944 two ghettos were established not far from city's center by the main Nazi specialist. The brutalities were organized by an assigned mayor from the west. About 30,000 Oradean Jewish citizens, and some from nearby areas, were forced into the ghettos. Most endured the inhuman conditions; many were tortured; some committed suicide; a very few escaped.

Within weeks, the ghettos were emptied and all were forced aboard freight trains in the area of Balcescu (Rhédey) Park, two or three thousand people a day, a total of seven shipments.

They were delivered to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the vast majority met the fate of the six million European Jews lost in the war.

Of those very few who survived, some returned to their city, again under Romanian rule and called Oradea. A small new Jewish community formed, attracting survivors from nearby areas as well. Many who had lost spouses and children quickly remarried. New families were established. The community grew within a few years to perhaps one-quarter the size it had once been.

Under the Communist regime imposed in 1945 there were new hardships. Romania grew increasingly intolerant of Jewish independence. Newly-formed Zionist organizations were liquidated, their leaders often arrested and imprisoned. Most Jews decided to leave and make lives elsewhere, but applying for travel privileges could label a person an enemy of the state. Many lost their jobs and a
few were incarcerated in Gulag-style forced labor camps, established throughout Romania under the Stalin-influenced dictatorship.

In the 1950s, Romania began selling its Jewish citizens to Israel, at first in exchange for services such as factory construction and later for hard currency. Eventually Ceausescu extended the practice to include the sale of Germans and Romanians who wanted to move to Germany. He is reported to have said that Romania's most important exports were "Jews, Germans and oil."

Most of Oradea's remaining Jewish families emigrated to Israel, North America, Western Europe and Australia. Today, while there are only a few hundred still living in Oradea, there are new generations and large numbers throughout the world with direct ties to the city. Some among them have a deep and abiding interest in the place that was home to their brothers and sisters, parents and grandparents.

Since 2001, a group from North America, supported by the Lempert Family Foundation, has been in contact with Oradea's Jewish community, its municipal officials, educators, journalists, and church and ethnic leaders about ways to preserve the memory.

© 2008 Lempert Family Foundation. All rights reserved.



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  Jewish Life During the 20th Century
  http://www.oradeajc.com/index.html

After an era of prosperity at the turn of the century, the Jewry of Oradea participated along with everyone in the country in the hardships imposed by World War I.

Schools and the Jewish hospital were placed at the disposal of the Army, while Jewish men from Oradea and Bihor County fought as soldiers in the Austro - Hungarian Army. Some distinguished themselves in warfare and earned medals, as listed in Tereza Mozes's book "Evreii din Oradea" (Jews of Oradea) including Vilmos Acs, Dr. Peter Vali, Dr. Bela Fleischer, Dr. Pal Ney, Dr. Bernat Grunstein, Dr. Bertalan Stern, Sandor Friedlander, Andor Sonnenfeld, Gusztav Sonnenfeld, Sandor Korda, Sandor Meer, Miklos Stern, Dr. Albert Feld, and Rezso Molnar mentioned in Daniel Lowy's chapter. Many others died or were taken prisoner, and still more were wounded. Both grandfathers of this author  (Lempert) were surviving veterans of World War I, only to become victims in Auschwitz some thirty years later.

Following World War I, according to the terms of the Peace Treaty of Trianon signed on June 20, 1920, Transylvania became part of Romania. Luckily for Oradeans, the transition was peaceful. In the beginning of this new era for Oradea, the Jewish population adjusted reasonably well.

Through continued hard work and the possibilities offered in the beginning by a fairly liberal government, they were able to prosper. They created new factories and enterprises, such as the Oradea Weaving and Textile Factory of Iosif Silbermann, the Comb Factory of Farkas Ripner, and the Drugs and Chemical factory of Armin Meszinger. Important establishments from this era, including the Steiner Family Bread Bakery, the Derbi Shoe Factory owned by Farkas Moskovits, and N. Steiner's Carmen Shoe Factory, although renamed since continue functioning to this day.

The relatively quiet life of Oradea Jews was painfully disturbed in the summer of 1927, when a group of highly nationalistic and fascist-spirited elements created an organization called Legiunea Arhanghelului Mihail (The Legion of Archangel Michael), also known as the Iron Guard.

The organization's main duty was to preserve Romania and the Romanian people from the overwhelming presence of foreigners (Jews) in all aspects of life. They agitated against Jews and later also were able to influence the government.

In December 1927, Oradean Jews were to find out about Romanian anti-Semitism directly, during the National Student Congress organized in the city. Romanian students, who besides openly discussing and demanding the exclusions of foreigners (Jews) from schools and universities, organized terrorist acts against the Jewish community.

They beat up over a hundred Jewish people in the streets and vandalized synagogues and Jewish facilities. The political situation worsened in the mid 1930s, after the creation of the Partidul National Crestin (Christian Nationalist Party), which had as its primary program the introduction of national anti-Semitic policies.

Jewish rights were becoming more and more restricted up until August 30, 1940, when following the second Vienna Awards, Oradea became part of Hungary. This was the time when the most vicious anti-Jewish laws were passed by the Hungarian State. From then on, the situation of the city's Jewish population worsened by the day. Starting in the summer of 1942, Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 45 (later up 58) were taken to forced labor battalions, where they were assigned menial, difficult and dangerous jobs as servants of the Hungarian Army.

Unarmed, they were often sent ahead of the army as scouts to discover land mines. A great number of them perished during such operations, as well as due to the harsh, inhuman treatments by the Hungarian commanders. It is important to mention though that there were a very few exceptions among those commanders who behaved compassionately with the Jewish men - for example, Lieutenant General Imre Reviczky, as well as Lieutenant Istvan Toth of Oradea.

 Meanwhile, back in the city, government adopted laws included confiscation of Jewish businesses and exclusion of Jewish employees from their place of work. Signs appeared in store windows stating that they don't serve Jewish customers. On April 26, 1944, the government decreed the seizure of all Jewish personal property and residences, which meant the final loss of personal freedom as well.

The total population of Oradea in 1944 was about 90,000 people, including roughly 30,000 Jews. Within a few days' time, by the first week of May 1944, the Hungarian authorities squeezed with great precision the Jewish population of the city into a ghetto set up in an already crowded poor district.

They also brought in approximately 8,000 Jews from the County, whom they placed in a separate ghetto, without a roof over their heads.

The Oradea ghetto became the second largest in Hungary, after Budapest and the living circumstances of its inhabitants were beyond imagination. Many died and many committed suicide.

After beating, terrorizing, starving and robbing the ghettoized Jews of their last personal assets, and after spreading misleading information about taking them to work in the Transdanubian region of Hungary to keep them better under control, between May 25 - June 3, 1944 the Hungarian gendarmes and officials instead crammed them into cattle wagons.

They forced 80 to 90 people in each wagon designated for five to six animals and provided them with one bucket of water per wagon for the four-day journey to the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only a few people in the typhus hospital were left behind to be shipped after their quarantine period was over.

The possibility of escaping from the ghetto was almost impossible and afterwards improbable, as the great majority of the city's population was unwilling, afraid or uninterested in helping Jews.

 A virulent anti-Semite, acting Mayor Gyapai, who signed the deportation orders, escaped with his family just before the liberation of Oradea in October 1945, and later was admitted to the U.S., where he lived unpunished in Montana with his family until his death.

When the war ended, about 2,000 survivors returned to the city, many in hope of finding other surviving relatives. For the majority of those survivors, the political Iron Curtain descended swiftly, trapping them inside a new totalitarian dictatorship.

 During a few open window periods of legal emigration, in the early 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the majority of the Jewish population left Oradea, resettling mostly in Israel, the U.S., Europe, and various other parts of the globe.

© 2008 Lempert Family Foundation. All rights reserved.


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