The Jews of Satu Mare: From a Closed Royal Town to a Community of 13,000

For more than a century Satmar was a royal town that Jews could enter only on fair days. In 1941 nearly 13,000 Jews lived there, a quarter of the population, and within two weeks, between 19 May and 1 June 1944, all of them were deported to Auschwitz together with the Jews of the surrounding district.

Distillers and Tavern Keepers

Jews first appear in Satu Mare (Hungarian: Szatmárnémeti; Yiddish: Satmar) at the beginning of the eighteenth century. According to the Archives of Jewish Bukovina and Transylvania at the Leo Baeck Institute, they distilled brandy and leased taverns on crown estates. In 1715 Satmar became a free royal town. The Jews living there were expelled, and for generations Jews were allowed in only for the fairs. The Encyclopaedia Judaica records 11 Jews in the town in 1734 and 19 in 1746.

Permanent settlement resumed in the 1820s and gathered pace in the middle of the century. In 1841 several Jews received permits to settle for good, and in 1850 the town counted 78 Jews. The community was formally organised in 1849; its first rabbi, Benjamin Ze’ev (Farkas) Mandelbaum, served until his death at the end of the century (1896 according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 1897 according to the Leo Baeck Institute). The first synagogue was built in 1857, and the first Jewish schools opened in 1866.

Rapid Growth and an Orthodox Community

In the second half of the nineteenth century the community grew rapidly. The town counted 3,427 Jews — in 1870 according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, in 1890 according to the Leo Baeck Institute — and by 1910 there were 7,194, about a fifth of the population. In 1930 Satu Mare, by then part of Romania, had 11,533 Jews, and in 1941 12,960, or 24.9 per cent of the population.

In 1869, in the years of the great schism of Hungarian Jewry, the community declared itself Orthodox. The struggle within it did not end there: from the late nineteenth century Hasidim and their opponents clashed. When Rabbi Judah Grünwald, a supporter of the Hasidim, was elected in 1897, his opponents left and in 1898 founded a Status Quo community, which built its own synagogue in 1904. From 1902 (1903 according to the Leo Baeck Institute) it was led by Rabbi Dr Samuel Sándor Jordán, a Zionist who, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, founded the first Hebrew kindergarten in Hungary.

From 1920 the Orthodox rabbinate was held by Rabbi Eliezer David Grünwald, whose yeshiva had about 400 students according to the Leo Baeck Institute. In the same years, from 1920 to 1936, the Hasidic leader Rabbi Aharon Roth was active in the town; he later founded the Toldot Aharon community in Jerusalem. Grünwald’s death in 1928 opened a six-year succession struggle that ended in 1934 with victory for the supporters of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum. For that story, see our article on the origins of Satmar Hasidism.

Printing, Zionism and a Hospital

Alongside the yeshivas, the institutions of a modern urban community took shape. The first Jewish printing press was founded in 1903 and the Jewish hospital opened in 1927. In the 1920s there were two Jewish elementary schools and a school for apprentices, and the Status Quo community ran an elementary school and a vocational school. Between the world wars the town had Zionist branches — Mizrachi was the strongest — a B’nai B’rith lodge and a branch of the Jewish Party. Jews were prominent in industry, trade, the professions and the Hungarian-language press.

1940–1944: Kamenets-Podolsk and Forced Labour

In September 1940, under the Second Vienna Award, Satu Mare returned to Hungary. Hungarian racial laws immediately restricted the livelihoods and rights of the Jews. From 1940 to 1944 a Jewish secondary school for boys and girls operated in the town, taking in pupils pushed out of the general schools.

In the summer of 1941 Jews who could not prove Hungarian citizenship were deported from Hungary to the Kamenets-Podolsk area in occupied Ukraine, where most were murdered at the end of August by German and Hungarian forces. According to the memorial portal of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, up to a thousand Jews from Satu Mare were affected, and few returned. From 1942 most Jewish men aged 21 to 45 were drafted into the Hungarian army’s forced-labour battalions, and many of them died on the Eastern Front.

1944: The Ghetto and the Deportations

After Germany occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944, the Hungarian authorities moved quickly. According to the Wiesel Commission report, the first conference on concentrating the Jews of Gendarmerie District IX was held in Satu Mare on 6 April 1944. The ghetto decree was issued on 26 April, and the round-up of the Jews of Northern Transylvania began at dawn on 3 May. In Satu Mare the ghetto was set up in a poor, mainly Jewish quarter. According to the ’45 Aid Society, it centred on the street now called Strada Martirilor Deportați, “Street of the Deported Martyrs”. Jews from eleven surrounding districts were also brought in, and at its peak the ghetto held about 18,000 people. Its commander was the police officer Béla Sárközi, and Jews were tortured during the searches for “hidden valuables”.

The ghetto was liquidated in six trains to Auschwitz-Birkenau: on 19 May (3,006 people), 22 May (3,300), 26 May (3,336), 29 May (3,306), 30 May (3,300) and 1 June (2,615). The total was 18,863, according to the Kassa (Košice) railway data in the appendix to the Wiesel Commission report. The report itself cautions that these figures do not always match other sources. Most of the deportees were murdered in the gas chambers on the day they arrived. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica fewer than 15 per cent survived; the memorial portal puts the figure at about 12 per cent, some 2,200 people.

After the War

At first about 500 Jews returned. By 1947 the community numbered about 5,000 according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, or about 7,500 according to the Leo Baeck Institute and the memorial portal. Many of them were Jews from southern Transylvania and other parts of Romania, and some were only passing through on their way west. Emigration, mostly to Israel, reduced the community to about 500 in 1970, and according to the Leo Baeck Institute 38 Jews remained in the town in 2002.

The organised community is somewhat larger, since it also includes family members and associate members: about 110 according to JTA in 2017, and about 150 to 200 according to the community’s president in 2020. It maintains the great synagogue and is responsible for dozens of Jewish cemeteries in the county: 123 according to JTA in 2004 and 129 according to JTA in 2017.

Visiting

A short route through Jewish Satu Mare begins at the Great Synagogue compound at Strada Decebal 4: the synagogue, the Talmud Torah prayer house and the memorial to the victims of 1944 in the courtyard. From there you can continue to Strada Martirilor Deportați, where, according to the ’45 Aid Society, the ghetto was centred. According to the community’s president, nineteen rabbis are buried in the Orthodox cemetery, which has seen no burials for about forty years. Kohanim pray outside the fence.

Visits to the synagogue and the cemetery are arranged in advance with the office of the Jewish Community, Strada Decebal 4A, tel. +40 261 713 703 (according to the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania). No regular opening hours have been published.