The Vizhnitz Kloyz: Sighet’s Last Historic Synagogue

Of the dozens of synagogues, kloyzn and shtiblekh that stood in Sighet on the eve of the Holocaust, one historic synagogue remains: the kloyz of the Vizhnitz Hasidim on Strada Basarabiei, built at the start of the twentieth century. Locals call it the “Sephardic synagogue”, although nothing about it is Sephardic except its prayer rite.

A Town of Kloyzn

According to the Archives of Jewish Bukovina and Transylvania at the Leo Baeck Institute, by the late nineteenth century Sighet had more than a dozen study houses and kloyzn alongside its large synagogues. The tourism site True Romania counts, at the peak, two “temples”, six synagogues and thirteen prayer houses, and the Tarbut Foundation in Sighet speaks of about a dozen large synagogues of different streams, besides shtiblekh in private homes. Every Hasidic court – Teitelbaum, Kosov, Vizhnitz, Spinka, Kretchnev – kept its own place of prayer.

The Vizhnitz Hasidim were a major force in the region: according to the Leo Baeck archive, the Vizhnitzer rebbe’s followers dominated most of Máramaros County. In the town itself they were a minority beside the Teitelbaum court, but a community wealthy and settled enough to build an impressive house of prayer.

The Vizhnitzer Kloyz

According to the Tarbut Foundation and the Jewish Heritage Travel Guide (jguideeurope), the synagogue was built in 1902 in an eclectic Moorish style. True Romania dates it to 1901–1902 and attributes it to the Káhán (Kahana) family, one of the town’s wealthy families. We found no second source for that attribution, so it is given here in that site’s name only.

The name “Sephardic” puzzles many visitors. In Sighet, as across Hungary, “Sephardim” were the Hasidim who prayed in nusach Sefard, as distinct from those who kept nusach Ashkenaz. The Leo Baeck archive describes the community’s split in 1887 into an Orthodox camp and a “Sephardi” – Hasidic – camp that later joined the Status Quo stream. In heritage guides it also appears as the “Klaus Wijnitzer Temple” or the “Vijnițer Klaus Temple”.

War, Warehouse and Restoration

According to True Romania, the building served as a warehouse during the war, which is probably what saved it. After the war it became the religious centre of the survivors who returned to the town – about 2,300 people in 1947, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica – and for decades their only synagogue. According to the Tarbut Foundation, it was restored in 2004.

Today it has no regular minyan, neither on weekdays nor on festivals. According to the Tarbut Foundation, services are held when large groups visit, especially around the anniversary of the deportation at the end of May, when descendants of Sighet’s Jews come from Israel and the United States.

The Lost Synagogues

The town’s great synagogue was burned during the war. According to the Tarbut Foundation, survivors who returned in 1945 built the memorial to the victims on its site, at Strada Gheorghe Doja 75. True Romania describes the Teitelbaums’ “Great Orthodox Synagogue” as a complex with the rabbi’s house, study halls and a mikveh, which was burned after serving as a food warehouse; according to that site only the walls of the mikveh survive.

A photograph in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum archive shows the burned-out Malbish Arumim synagogue on Teglash Street after the deportation of the town’s Jews in 1944. The Maramureș memorial book also names the Talmud Torah synagogue, the kloyz of the Kosov Hasidim, the study house of Rabbi Yosef Lichtenstein, where he preached Zionism, and the large study house built by the followers of Rabbi Pinchas Hager in 1927. Almost all of them vanished without trace.

The New Synagogue

On 21 May 2017 the cornerstone of a new Satmar synagogue was laid at a ceremony attended, according to True Romania, by more than 250 rabbis led by Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, whose grandfather, Rabbi Joel of Satmar, was born in Sighet. The synagogue was inaugurated in November 2021, alongside a complex that includes a restaurant, a school and a hotel. According to Digi24 it was funded entirely by the Hasidic community of New York. Sighet thus has two synagogues today: the historic kloyz on Strada Basarabiei and the large new Satmar building.

A third witness to the prayer life of Maramureș stands outside town, in the Maramureș Village Museum: the Drimer House, a wooden house moved from the village of Bârsana and opened to visitors in May 2014. According to the Tarbut Foundation, its owner was a rabbi, shochet and teacher, and his home also served as a prayer house and an inn for travellers, until he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. It is one of the few places where one can see what a village Jew’s house of prayer in Maramureș looked like.

Visiting

The synagogue stands on Strada Basarabiei in the town centre – number 8 according to jguideeurope, number 10 according to the Tarbut Foundation – a short walk from the Elie Wiesel House. No fixed opening hours have been published. Arrange a visit in advance with the Jewish community of Sighet, with the local Tarbut Foundation, which offers guided tours, or through the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania. The cemetery and the memorial on Strada Gheorghe Doja complete the walk.