The Jews of Deva: The Synagogue That Survived the War and Came Back to Life

In the 1930s more than 900 Jews lived in Deva, praying in two houses of worship and sustaining a life of community, learning and charity. During the war Jews uprooted from the villages of Hunedoara County were concentrated in the town, and many of the men were sent to forced labour. The Great Synagogue, listed as a building of 1896, survived the war and the community’s decline, and was restored and rededicated on 31 March 2019.

What the Deva synagogue tells us

In the centre of Deva, below the citadel that towers over the town, stands the Great Synagogue, the Templul Mare. Its yellow façade does not tell the whole story: this was the heart of the community; during the war it served as a forced shelter for Jews uprooted from the surrounding villages; and after decades of decline it was restored and reopened in a festive ceremony in 2019.

The synagogue is listed as a historic monument in Romania under the code HD-II-m-B-03230. The official monuments list gives the year 1896, as does the record of the Center for Jewish Art. Other sources mention c. 1897, and some also refer to later building phases, so it is safest to say that the synagogue was built at the end of the 19th century.

The community: trade, learning and a shared life

Organised Jewish life in Deva is documented from the 19th century. Community sources date the community’s legal beginnings to 1851, with a burial society active soon afterwards. In 1900 the town had 529 Jews, and the 1930 census counted 914 Jews, about 8.7% of Deva’s population. On the eve of the war the community numbered some 900 people.

Life between the wars is captured in the testimony of Andrei Lorincz, born in Deva in 1924 and interviewed by the Centropa project in 2003. He described a town where Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, Jews and others lived side by side. His family kept kosher and observed Shabbat, and from the age of four he attended a cheder held on the synagogue premises.

According to Lorincz, Deva had two congregations and two houses of prayer: the Great Synagogue and a small prayer house on a street that in communist times was called “23 August”. Both congregations considered themselves Orthodox, one of them stricter than the other; other sources classify Deva’s religious streams differently. The small prayer house was demolished after the war.

In his recollection, Rabbi Iuliu Fischer led the larger congregation, while Rabbi Filip Klein served the other prayer house and remained in the town during the war years. The community included merchants, craftsmen, doctors, lawyers and teachers, and maintained its own institutions of education, charity and religious life.

An unusual building among Transylvania’s synagogues

The Great Synagogue is built in the Neo-Romanesque style. Unlike synagogues where the ark stands at the end of a long hall, the Deva hall is wide, and the Torah ark sits in a niche in the east wall between two large stained-glass windows. Facing it along the west wall is a two-storey women’s gallery, and the ceiling is a barrel vault.

The Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University records the architect as unknown. Local sources attribute the design to Ignatius (Ignác) Mahler and mention a rebuilding in 1905–1907, but this attribution has not been confirmed by an independent source.

The Holocaust years: not the fate of Northern Transylvania

In August 1940 Northern Transylvania was handed to Hungary, but Deva remained under Romanian rule. In 1944 the Jews of Northern Transylvania were deported en masse to Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Hungarian authorities, together with Nazi Germany. The Deva community was not part of that mass deportation.

That does not mean the Jews of Deva escaped persecution. Under the Antonescu regime Jewish property was confiscated and harsh restrictions imposed, and Jews from the villages and small towns of Hunedoara County were forcibly moved to urban concentration centres, among them Deva, Hațeg and Ilia. According to community and historical sources, more than 400 Jews uprooted from elsewhere were crowded into the Great Synagogue in 1941.

Jewish men were conscripted for forced labour. Andrei Lorincz recalled working for about a year and a half on the construction of the Deva–Brad railway alongside hundreds of other Jews, after his family had lost its home and his father his livelihood. The Deva community archive preserves registers of Jews moved from their homes, records of forced labour and of deportees to Transnistria, and pupil registers of the Jewish school that operated in the town in 1941–1944. These records document individuals and groups, not the deportation of the whole community.

In 1942 plans were advanced to deport the Jews of Southern Transylvania and the Banat to the death camps in Poland, but the planned mass deportation was never carried out. This is the decisive historical difference between the two parts of Transylvania, even though both saw severe persecution.

What remained of the community after the war

After the war many of the region’s Jews emigrated to Israel, mainly after the founding of the state and in further waves during the communist period. The local archive preserves membership, death and burial records, minute books and letters sent by former members of the community.

Lorincz, who stayed in Romania, remained active in the small community, and in 2003 described very small Shabbat gatherings. Rabbi Alexandru Max, who was also the community’s president and, according to his successor, its last rabbi, died in 2009. He was succeeded at the head of the community by Liviu Lăcătușu, who led the restoration effort.

31 March 2019: the synagogue reopens

By the early 21st century the building had deteriorated. A first renovation took place in 2003–2004, and later a thorough restoration was needed. In 2017–2019 the structure was strengthened and the interior and façade restored, with funding that included support from the Romanian state and from the heritage bodies of the Jewish federation.

On Sunday, 31 March 2019, the synagogue was rededicated: Torah scrolls were returned to the ark, a mezuzah was affixed and memorial plaques on the façade were unveiled. Community members and guests from Romania and Israel took part. It marked not only the restoration of a building but the return of Jewish memory to the heart of the town.

In a 2023 interview with Radio Romania, Lăcătușu said the building occasionally hosts holidays, Oneg Shabbat gatherings, exhibitions and concerts, and that at the time the women’s galleries were closed to the public pending a safety permit.

The cemetery and the archive

The Jewish cemetery of Deva is another part of the community’s heritage. The community’s registers preserve burial records from 1932 to 2012 and a plot index, and in 2020 the community’s president described its responsibility for maintaining the cemetery in the town and other Jewish cemeteries in the county.

The community archive, described by the Archives of Jewish Bukovina and Transylvania project at the Leo Baeck Institute, preserves part of the historical record: school registers, the list of those forcibly moved from the villages, burial records and a 1956 map of Jewish institutions in the county. For anyone researching family roots in Deva it is a valuable resource; access is by arrangement with the community.

Visiting

• The site: the Great Synagogue of Deva (Sinagoga Mare / Templul Mare din Deva), in the town’s historic centre.
• Arranging a visit: there are no fixed opening hours. Visits should be arranged in advance with the Deva Jewish community; the phone number in the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania’s directory is +40 254 215 550, and it is worth checking that it is still in use before travelling.
• Access: entry to the prayer hall, the women’s galleries and the cemetery is not guaranteed and depends on arrangement with the community.
• Shabbat-observant visitors: there is no guaranteed regular minyan; check with the community before planning a Shabbat in the town.