SZIGET, HUNGARY
A SHORT HISTORY OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY
Maramarossziget, now Sighetu Marmatei, Romania, located on the Tisza River in northern Transylvania, was a center of Orthodox and Chassidic Jewish life in Maramaros megye (county ) from the late 18th century. The culture and history of the Jewish community is described in The Heart Remembers: Jewish Sziget, a memorial book published in 2003 by the Association of Former Szigetians in Israel.
Although there were Jewish settlements in other parts of Transylvania as far back as 1571, the first Jewish families didn’t arrive in Sziget until the beginning of the 18th century. The Land Census of 1728 lists only four Jewish residents. By 1740 there were enough Jews for a permanent minyan-- the 1746 Census reported 10 Jewish families with 39 persons. In 1787 the population of Sziget had grown to 3,495 residents, representing about 4 percent of the total population of Maramaros county (megye in Hungarian), including 142 Jews.
Following the Partition of Poland in 1772, the Jewish population continued to increase as families migrated south from Galicia. They built the first Sziget synagogue in 1807 and by 1828 there were 46 Jewish households, representing about 11 percent of the population.
During the second half of the 19th century, the Jewish population increased rapidly to 4,960 in 1891 (about 30 percent of the total population), 7,981 in 1910 (34%), 10,609 (38% in 1930 and 10,144 (39%) in 1941. According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, Sziget had the highest proportion of Jews of any Hungarian town and most of them were Orthodox.
R. Zvi ben Moses Abraham (d. 1771) was one of the first rabbis to serve the Sziget's Jewish community but the first official appointment went to Rabbi Yehuda ben Yosef Heller-Kahana In 1802, his supporters prevailed in a dispute with community members who favored Rabbi Menahem Mendel ben Samuel Stern, who was head of the Sziget rabbinical court (beit din). After Rabbi Yehuda’s death in 1819, Rabbi Stern succeeded him as rabbi.
Under the Ausgleich (Settlement) that established the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Transylvania became part of greater Hungary. During the so-called "Golden Era" of Hungarian Jewish history, from 1867 until World War I, many Transylvanian Jews eagerly adopted Hungarian language and culture and assumed an increasingly larger role in business, professions, and government.
Reflecting the schism that affected the entire Hungarian Jewish community, a large proportion of the Jewish population, resisted modernization and clung to Orthodox traditions. Although the leading Jewish families in Sziget, including the Kahans, amassed considerable wealth from forestry and other holdings, many of these pious, Yiddish-speaking Jews continued to eke out a living as traders, peddlars, unskilled laborers, and artisans.
Following the defeat of the Central Powers in 1918, the Treaty of Trianon divided Transylvania. The area south of the Tisza River, including Sziget, was ceded to Romania while the region to the north became part of the new Republic of Czechoslovakia. Conditions grew increasingly oppressive as the Romanian government ignored and then contributed to growing anti-Semitism.
Market day in Sziget’s central square c. 1917. The Jewish quarter was close to the square, which is now known as Piata Libertaii.
In 1941 a large number of "alien" Jews, including refugees who had fled to the relative safety of Hungary across the Carpathians, were deported from Sighet to Kamanets - Podolski, where they were massacred late in August. Although the county belonged geographically to northern Transylvania, which Hungary acquired from Romania in September 1940, its Jews were liquidated together with those of Carpathian Ruthenia (the Transcarpathian Ukraine) and northeastern Hungary.
Sighet’s Jews were ordered to enter a ghetto in April and early May of 1944. Established in two outlying areas of the city, which were inhabited primarily by Sighet's poorer Jewish residents, the ghetto was unbelievablely crowded, with about twenty people in every room. After the Nazis and their Hungarian cohorts rounded up the Jewish residents of rural communities in the neighboring districts, the population of the Sighet ghetto swelled to almost 13,000. The ghetto was liquidated when the Jews were deported to Auschwitz in four transports between May 16 and 22, 1944.
In 1947, Sighet still had 2,308 Jews, including not only survivors but also a considerable number of Jews who settled there from other parts of Romania, to which the city reverted after the war. My second-cousin Alex (Simcha) Adler and his family were among the post-war Jewish residents of Sighet, most of whom remained only because the Romanian government wouldn't approve their emigration. Alex and his family left Sighet in 1961 and now live in Bronx, N.Y.
Sziget panorama, late 19th century
Sighet after deportation, 1944. (Albert Rosenthal, USHMM)
Sziget wooden shul between the wars (USHMM)
(Left) The Orthodox Synogogue (Beit HaKnesset HaGadol) on Nagykoz utca, built in 1836, was badly damaged by bombing at the end of the war and had to be demolished.