The town of Sighetu Marmatiei, simply Sighet to Romanians, was once an important Hasidic religious center and had a vibrant and organized Jewish community in the 1930s that disappeared in the Holocaust.
by Ricardo Angoso
The town of Sighetu Marmatiei is known in Romania for two things: one is that the writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel was born here, and also because during the communist era in Romania (1945-1989) it housed one of the worst prisons of the regime, where numerous Romanian dissidents and political prisoners served their sentences. Today, the prison is a museum that tries to conjure up the mistakes of the past and teach future generations what the sinister communist period meant in Romanian history.
In the past, as in many Romanian towns, especially in Transylvania, Sighetu Marmatiei had a large and active Jewish community, which also disappeared during the Holocaust. In 1771, in Sighetu Marmaţiei there was a strong Jewish community that was organised and articulated through a brotherhood called Jevra Kadisha (Holy Burial Association). At this time we also find that some of the Jews of Sighet joined the sect led by Jacob Frank (1726-1791). Frank was a Polish Jew, creator of Frankism and a Jewish pretender to messiahship in the line of the false prophet called Shabtai Tzvi (a rabbi who declared himself the Jewish Messiah in 1648). The sect was very successful and spread throughout Poland, Romania, the Balkans and a large part of the Ottoman Empire until the Turkish sultan of the time demanded that Tzvi perform a miracle in his presence, but he was unable to do so, being forced to do so under penalty of being sentenced to death or accepting to convert to Islam, which he ended up doing and the apostasy of the false messiah ended.
Among the major Hasidic sects in Sighet, one should note the followers of Rabbi Yekuti'el Yehudah (1912-1944), Lipa Teitelbaum and later his uncle Yoel Teitelbaum (leader of Satmar Hasidism); the followers of Rabbi Vizhnitser, whose Hasidim continued to dominate most of Maramures County; and followers of new Hasidic dynasties such as Spinka, founded by Yosef Me'ir Weiss, and Kretchnev (a branch of Nadworna). Source used and consulted:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/sighet
Once the Jews settled in Sighet at the beginning of the 142th century, in the following century, as a result of the settlement of Jews in Poland, their number increased from 1785 in 3.380 to 1880 in 1910. In 7.981, 1930 Jews lived in Sighet and in 10.144 the Jewish population was 1807. In XNUMX the first synagogue was built and the community can be said to be fully organized. The period of splendour of the Jewish community began in the late XNUMXth century until the late XNUMXs, although the climate in this region was always anti-Semitic, both among the Hungarian and Romanian populations that made up Transylvania.
On the pages of the Tarbut Foundation we have been able to find this account of the history of the Jews of the city: “In the mid-1870s, members of the Orthodox Jewish community published two Hebrew newspapers, the first in all of Hungary. By the end of the 7.000th century, Jewish immigration increased and the number of Jews in Sighet reached XNUMX, representing a third of the population. This boosted the economy, and by the end of the century another dozen newspapers were published to meet the needs of the community. The newspaper industry, for both Jews and non-Jews, was soon dominated by Jews who acted as printers, journalists, editors and publishers. Sighet also became known as a center for printing religious books, and its printing presses published hundreds of Jewish holy books, written by both local and foreign rabbis.” Source consulted and cited: https://www.ftsighet.com/sighet
Very soon, as we read in The Cultural Guide of Jewish Europe, “the city became an important center of religious movements, especially of Hasidism. Rabbis included Judah ha-Kohen Heller, Zevi Moses Abraham, Hananiah Yom Tov Lipa Teitelbaum, and Samuel Danzig. The latter headed the liberal Sephardic community. Jewish religious and cultural life was very rich, although most Jews lived in poverty. There were Jewish schools, yeshivot, newspapers, and libraries. Many cultural figures emerged in the city, including the author Hirsch Leib Gottlieb, the Yiddish poet J. Holder, the Yiddish author J. Ring, the pianist Geza Frid, and of course the author Elie Wiesel. Jewish plays and art gatherings were held there.”
Source consulted and cited:
https://jguideeurope.org/en/region/romania/transylvania/sighet-marmatiei/
Until 1888, the Jewish cemetery was owned by the city council; it was only after the Jewish Emancipation Act, which allowed the ownership of property used by Jews, on 1 January 1888, that the community was able to buy the land of the former cemetery for 200 florins for the benefit of the Burial Society. This cemetery, as a sign of the contempt that the communist authorities felt towards the few Jews who survived the Holocaust, was converted into a park in 1969.
But let us continue with our story. After recovering from the economic crisis that followed the First World War, the Jewish congregation in Sighet regained its strength and by 1920 its 11.000 Jews constituted almost half of the town's population. At that time, Zionist activity intensified despite the objections of the community's rabbis and, although most of Sighet's Jews adhered to tradition, many joined Zionist organizations. The 1920s and 1930s were marked by a boom in cultural activities. Many more Jewish boys and girls enrolled in municipal schools, in addition to continuing their traditional studies. Jewish life, despite sporadic cases of anti-Semitism, continued with great strength and liveliness.
The Tarbut Foundation gives us some insight into life in the period from the end of the First World War to 1940: “Jewish painters and sculptors exhibited their works, musicians played in concert halls and coffee houses, and Jews formed their own choirs. Local and visiting actors performed Jewish plays in the local theatre, and Jewish and non-Jewish films were shown in the local cinema. Authors wrote prose and poetry, public libraries were filled with young people who read everything they could get their hands on, and prominent Jewish intellectuals gave lectures. Jews formed football and tennis teams that competed with other Jewish and non-Jewish teams. This activity was well documented in the literary and cultural journals published during the 1930s until the Holocaust.”
BEFORE AND AFTER THE HOLOCAUST
In 1940, like a large part of Transylvania, the town was awarded by the Second Vienna Arbitration to Hungary, an ally of the Nazi regime and collaborator in the sadly known “Final Solution.” As we have been able to read in some pages of the local Jewish community, these are the events that finally precipitated the deportation of almost all the Jews of Sighet: “On April 20, 1944, the Jews of the town were evacuated from their homes and confined in a ghetto that included four streets of the town, inhabited mostly by poor Jews. The large number of inmates made the ghetto extremely overcrowded. In each room of the ghetto lived about 20 people. Security was provided by the Sighet police and the Hungarian gendarmerie. At the same time, there was another ghetto in the town, called the “small ghetto,” in which Jews from other localities in the county were confined. The total number of Jews in the two Sighet ghettos was about 13.000.”
Source cited and consulted:
https://roholocaust.com/event/84~Jews-in-Sighet-during-the-Holocaust
From 16 to 22 May 1944, all detainees were loaded onto cattle trains and sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Of the nearly 14.000 Jews deported from Sighet in May 1944, it is estimated that only a few hundred survived after the war. In 1947, Sighet had 2.308 Jews, including some survivors and a considerable number of Jews who settled there from other parts of Romania. By 1956, there were 1.381 Jews left. During the years of Communism, most of them left Romania. Today we have found no data on how many Jews remain in the town, if any.
All these sad events are recounted by Elie Wiesel, the writer born in Shiget who was deported with his family from that city to Auschwitz, where his parents and two of his brothers died. Wiesel left us his testimony in several books and novels about his experience in concentration camps. He dedicated his entire life to writing and speaking about the horrors of the Holocaust, with the firm intention of preventing a similar barbarity from being repeated in the world. And he prophetically warned us: “We cannot forget. The images are there, before our eyes. Even if the eyes were not there, the images would still be there. I think that if I had the capacity to forget, I would hate myself.”
As a final note, it should be noted that there are still three places in the city that still remember the rich Jewish heritage: the Jewish cemetery, which is at least almost three centuries old and where 5.000 Jews are buried in 16 plots; the Sephardic Synagogue, which is the only one that survived the Holocaust, also known as the Wijnitzer Klaus Synagogue - whose name is, paradoxically, Ashkenazi - and which was built in 1902 in an eclectic Moorish style and restored in 2004; and, finally, the Elie Wiesel Museum, the house where the writer spent his childhood until he was deported to the death camps and whose place today is a memorial house of the Jewish life cycle of the Sighet community before the Holocaust.
Source used and consulted: https://www.ftsighet.com/sighet
Address of the Jewish cemetery: Izei Street