The Jews of Cluj: From a City That Barred Them to Transylvania’s Zionist Capital

For centuries Jews could come to Cluj — Kolozsvár to Hungarians, Klausenburg to Germans — only for market days, not to live. Yet within less than a century of the ban’s repeal in 1848 they made up about an eighth of the population of Transylvania’s cultural capital, with three congregations, a Zionist daily and members of parliament. In 1944 all this was wiped out within six weeks.

A City That Closed Its Gates

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the earliest record of a Jew in Cluj dates from 1481, and in the 16th and 17th centuries Jewish merchants came to its fairs, mostly with goods from the Ottoman Empire. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), when the imperial general Giorgio Basta took the city in 1600, all the Jews found there were killed. In this period Jewish settlement in Transylvania was restricted almost entirely to Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia), the princes’ seat.

In 1784 the city council barred Jews from buying property and even from lodging there temporarily. The first Jew allowed to live in the city, Löbl (Leopold) Deutsch, fought the municipality for years; according to ANU his shop was closed in 1790, and when he protested, his 11-year-old daughter was abducted and baptised. According to a tradition cited in community histories, Jews who were not permitted to live in the city itself lived in the neighbouring village of Mănăștur (Kolozsmonostor) — a detail we could not confirm in the sources we checked. Despite the bans, a prayer room opened in 1807; by 1818 the community numbered 40 souls and kept a synagogue built of reeds; and in 1837 a chevra kadisha was founded. In 1839 fifteen families were allowed to live in the city, on condition that they did not host other Jews.

After 1848: Three Congregations

The revolution of 1848 and the imperial constitution that followed lifted the residence ban, and the community grew fast: 2,414 Jews in 1891, and 7,046 — 11.6% of the population — in 1910. The first synagogue was dedicated in 1851, and the first rabbi was Hillel Lichtenstein, who left after two years amid opposition within the community. He was followed by Abraham Glasner (1863–1877) and his son Moses Glasner (from 1878).

After the schism in Hungarian Jewry in 1868–1869, the main community organised as Orthodox. In 1881 a “Status Quo” congregation was formed; recognised as Neolog in 1884, it built the synagogue on what is now Horea Street in 1886–1887. In 1921 the Hasidim organised separately. Alongside these there was a Sephardi congregation — according to a testimony in the Centropa project, the smallest of the three communities, strictly religious and with a prayer house of its own; the Cluj memorial volume devotes a separate chapter to it. According to the same testimony, on the eve of the war the city had 15–20 prayer houses and five large synagogues.

Transylvania’s Zionist Capital

In 1918 Cluj passed to Romania, and its Jews, most of them Hungarian speakers, had to redefine themselves. Many found the answer in Zionism. On 20 November 1918 a Jewish mass meeting in the city gave rise to the Jewish National Association of Transylvania. At the end of 1918 Új Kelet (“New East”), a Zionist weekly in Hungarian, began to appear; in August 1920 it became a daily. It was the main organ of Transylvanian Zionism and, in the 1930s, also of the Jewish Party of Romania; the Hungarian authorities closed it in 1941. According to ANU, some 20 Jewish newspapers appeared in Cluj in Hungarian, Yiddish and Hebrew.

The leading figure of the period was Dr József Fischer — a leader of Transylvanian Zionism, president of the community and a member of the Romanian parliament. According to historian Attila Gidó, he headed the Transylvanian branch of the Jewish Party founded in 1931. In 1934 his daughter Elizabeth married a young Új Kelet journalist, Rezső Kasztner. In 1920 a Hebrew secondary school of the Tarbut network opened in the city under Mark Antal, and in 1921 a Hebrew teachers’ seminary. The Romanian authorities closed the school in 1927 — the year student riots also broke out in the city, in which, according to a dispatch from the US minister, six synagogues were wrecked. In 1930 Cluj had 13,504 Jews.

1944

In September 1940 Northern Transylvania passed to Hungary. Jewish men were drafted into forced-labour units and sent to the Soviet front, where most of them died, and in the summer of 1941 several hundred Jews who could not prove citizenship were deported to Kamenets-Podolsk and murdered. After the German occupation of Hungary, in May 1944 the Jews of the city and its surroundings were concentrated in a ghetto at the Iris brickyard — about 18,000 at its peak, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica (ANU gives 16,763) — and between 25 May and 9 June 1944 they were deported to Auschwitz in six transports. On 10 June a group of several hundred from the ghetto (388 according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 338 according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum) was taken to Budapest under the arrangement Kasztner reached in negotiations with the SS. It joined the train that left Budapest on 30 June and eventually reached Switzerland via Bergen-Belsen. The affair remains one of the most contested in the history of the Holocaust and in Israeli law. We tell the story of the ghetto, the deportation and the Kasztner affair in full in our story on the Holocaust in Cluj.

After the War

In 1947 about 6,500 Jews were counted in Cluj — returning survivors and Jews from the surrounding small towns. The community reorganised, but the communist regime closed the Jewish schools in 1948, and Zionist activity continued only until 1949. Most Jews emigrated to Israel. In 1970, 1,100 Jews (340 families) remained, praying in three synagogues and maintaining a shochet and a kosher canteen. Around 2000 about 300 remained, most of them elderly, and the 2002 census recorded 223 Jews.

Even so, the city’s Jewish memory did not disappear. In 1990 an Institute for Hebrew and Jewish History was founded at Babeș-Bolyai University under the patronage of Dr Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger, the city’s last Neolog rabbi before the Holocaust. In 2018 the community numbered 423 members and restored the Horea Street synagogue, and in 2020 Muzeon, the first museum of Cluj Jewish history, opened.

Visiting

The natural starting point is the Neolog synagogue on Horea Street, the only active synagogue in the city. In the historic centre you can see from outside former synagogues that have become cultural and research institutions. The Muzeon museum moves at the end of 2026 to new premises at Strada Tipografiei 25 and is expected to be closed for several months — check before you go. To arrange visits to the synagogue and the cemeteries, contact the Jewish Community of Cluj; the website of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania gives the telephone number +40 264 433 470.