The Jews of Sighișoara: A Synagogue Below the Citadel

Sighișoara — Schäßburg to the Saxons and Segesvár to the Hungarians — is known for its fortified upper town, built by Saxon settlers. Jews arrived late and in small numbers, but the synagogue they built in 1903 in the lower town still stands, well kept and open to visitors — in a town where not a single Jew remains.

Outside the Saxon town

For most of its history Sighișoara was a town of Saxon craftsmen and merchants, and Jewish presence barely registered. The census figures given by JewishGen’s cemetery database show how small the community was: 12 Jews in 1838, six in 1850, 12 in 1857 and just 24 in the census of 1869–1870. According to the synagogue database of ANU – Museum of the Jewish People, an organised community formed in the 1860s and set up a house of prayer and a yeshiva with about 35 students. The community was Ashkenazi; according to accounts gathered in recent years, its educated members spoke mainly German and its craftsmen Yiddish.

The synagogue of 1903

According to ANU and to the list of Jewish sites in Romania compiled by the US Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, the synagogue was built in 1903, when the community numbered just over a hundred; some sources give another date (1911 also appears), but 1903 is the accepted one. It is a small synagogue in the lower town: a cream-coloured plastered façade, a steep gabled roof with pointed pediments, tall arched windows and round windows, and decorated mouldings over the entrance.

Inside, as ANU describes it, the prayer hall is painted pale blue, and stars are hand-painted on the white ceiling. The women’s gallery runs along three walls. The ark is of carved wood, painted white and topped with a dark blue Star of David, and palm trees are painted on the wall on either side — an allusion to “The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree” of Psalm 92. The bimah stands in the centre of the hall, enclosed by a white balustrade. According to these descriptions, the interior has survived almost unchanged.

Between the wars

The community stayed small in the Romanian period as well: the 1930 census counted 146 Jews in Sighișoara, and ANU gives a figure of 173 community members, about one per cent of the population. Its central institution was the synagogue on Strada Tache Ionescu.

The Second World War

In the partition of Transylvania in August 1940 the new border ran north of the town: Târgu Mureș, some 50 km to the north, was annexed to Hungary, while Sighișoara remained under Romanian rule. The town’s Jews suffered under Antonescu’s laws — according to ANU, a law of 27 November 1940 forced them to give up their property — yet in those same years the small community took in some 2,000 refugees, most likely Jews expelled from the surrounding villages, as happened in other towns of southern Transylvania. In 1942 the community opened a school for children in which the language of instruction was Yiddish.

Sources disagree about the fate of the town’s Jews. JewishGen’s database and a 2025 JTA report state that the Jews were concentrated in the Târgu Mureș ghetto and sent to Auschwitz, or that the Holocaust “killed most of the community”. But Târgu Mureș was then in Hungary and Sighișoara in Romania, where Jews were not deported to Auschwitz; and the post-war figures for the community — 286 people in 1948 and 217 in 1956, according to ANU and local accounts — do not fit a mass deportation. The reference may be to Jews from the town’s families who lived on the Hungarian side of the border. We found no scholarly source that settles the question.

After the war: a community that vanished

After the war the community grew briefly, with Jews arriving from the surrounding area, and then gradually emptied, mainly through emigration to Israel. According to ANU, 35 Jews remained in the town in 1966, ten in 1977, two in 1992 and one in 2007. The last minyan was held, according to ANU, in 1985 (JTA gives 1984). The last Jew, Eliu David Răducanu, served as the synagogue’s custodian, showed visitors around and sent the Torah scrolls to Bucharest; according to JTA, the lawyer Răducanu died in 2009.

Restoration and care

The synagogue stood closed for more than twenty years, until David Blum, a Jewish lawyer from New York, saw it on a visit and paid for its renovation in memory of his family. On 23 August 2007, according to ANU, its doors reopened at a ceremony attended by local residents and by Jews from Romania and Israel. Since then it has been looked after by its neighbours, Viorica and Ilie Băluț, Orthodox Christians who open it to visitors. The synagogue is no longer used for prayer, but it is well kept and open to visitors.

The building has also been a target of vandalism. According to PressHub, an incendiary bottle was once thrown through one of the windows, and the fire went out by itself, and in December 2021 swastikas were painted on the pillars of the façade; a 15-year-old was investigated over that incident, and the Federation of Jewish Communities installed security cameras. Other sources date the arson attempt to 2014 and also mention swastikas sprayed in 2015.

The cemetery

The Jewish cemetery, Orthodox, was founded in the 19th century. According to the US Commission’s survey of 2000, as reproduced by JewishGen, it lies on flat land on the edge of town, reached by a public road and without a sign; a fence with an unlocked gate surrounds it. Between 20 and 100 gravestones of limestone, granite and marble remain, with Hebrew inscriptions and traces of paint, the oldest from the 19th century. A quarter to a half of the stones are toppled or broken, and vegetation sometimes blocks access. The land is owned by the Jewish community, and the cemetery has no caretaker.

Visiting

The synagogue is on Strada Tache Ionescu in the lower town, a few minutes’ walk from the upper town; the house number is given as 11 in a PressHub report and as 10 in the US Commission’s list. There is no Jewish community in the town and no verified opening hours. According to the sources, the neighbours who look after the building open it to visitors, but it is best to arrange a visit in advance through the Jewish Community of Târgu Mureș or the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania. A visit to the cemetery, which has neither sign nor caretaker, is also best arranged in advance.

• The pale blue prayer hall and its starry ceiling
• The white ark and the painted palm trees
• The women’s gallery along three walls
• The cemetery on the edge of town