The Jews of Zalău: the cemetery of Zilah and a community reborn

Zalău (Hungarian Zilah), the county seat of Sălaj in north-western Romania, was home to a Jewish community of several hundred, mostly merchants and craftsmen. From 1940 to 1944 the town was under Hungarian rule, and in May 1944 its Jews were marched to the railway station, sent to the collection camp at the brick factory in Cehei and deported from there to Auschwitz. The synagogue was demolished in 1970, but the Jewish cemetery survives, and since 2013–2014 the town again has a registered Jewish community.

From market town to community

Jews came to Zilah late. According to JewishGen’s Cemetery Project, 7 Jews lived in the town in 1850 and 8 in 1857. The community then grew quickly: about 150 in 1880, 326 in 1900 and about 430 in 1910. The Hungarian census of 1910, which counted inhabitants by religion, recorded 415 Jews. According to the local newspaper Graiul Sălajului, which published a survey of the community’s history in 2016, it numbered 818 in 1928. In the Romanian census of 1930, members of the Jewish faith made up about 5% of the town’s population.

According to the same survey, in 1930 there were 147 Jewish merchants, about a quarter of the town’s merchants. The firm Zuckermann és Schwartz was the largest clothing and footwear business in town. Between the wars, Jews also owned a brickworks, a flour mill and oil press, a distillery and a tile factory. Alongside them were the Israelite Women’s Association and the Israelite Girls’ Association, both devoted to charity. Many of the town’s Jews spoke Hungarian and were part of Hungarian culture.

The synagogue that is gone

According to the community’s blog, drawing on the historian Mircea Moldovan, a minyan is recorded in Zalău in 1870 and a synagogue in 1880. Graiul Sălajului reports that the synagogue was built in 1903, measured 19 by 15 metres, and had the rabbi’s house, a mikveh and a slaughterhouse beside it. These may have been two successive buildings. After the war, when most Jews had left, the building was abandoned. According to the newspaper, it fell into ruin from 1955 and was sold and demolished in 1970. Today the only synagogue left in Sălaj County is the one in Șimleu Silvaniei, which houses the Northern Transylvania Holocaust Memorial Museum.

1940–1944: under Hungarian rule

Under the Second Vienna Award of August 1940, Northern Transylvania, including Zalău, passed to Hungary. According to Graiul Sălajului, as early as 1941 Jewish men from the town were sent to forced labour on fortifications at the front against the Soviet Union. The list of heads of Jewish families in the county in 1944, preserved in the Memorial Book of Sălaj Jewry (Tel Aviv, 1989), names more than a hundred heads of families from Zilah, among them Chief Rabbi Arthur Jungreis, the shochet Emanuel Gottlieb and the shammes Fischel.

After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, it was decided to concentrate the county’s Jews at Șimleu Silvaniei. The site chosen was the Klein brick factory in the village of Cehei, about five kilometres from the town. According to the Virtual Museum of the Holocaust in Northern Transylvania, about 8,500 Jews were brought there from the Crasna, Cehu Silvaniei, Jibou, Supuru de Jos, Șimleu Silvaniei, Tășnad and Zalău districts. According to Graiul Sălajului, in 1944, 92 families from Zalău, 541 people, were ordered to prepare food for fifteen days. Their property was confiscated, and they were marched to the railway station and taken from there to Cehei. Three trains left Cehei for Auschwitz, on 31 May, 3 June and 6 June 1944. According to the Virtual Museum, about 70% of the deportees were sent to the gas chambers on arrival.

According to the newspaper, 145 Jews returned to Zalău after the war. The great majority left between 1950 and 1955, most of them for Israel. In 1985, according to the same source, Talmud Torah classes and a choir led by Emil Rosenfeld were started in the town.

The cemetery

The Orthodox Jewish cemetery of Zalău was founded in the 19th century and lies in the town’s Traian district. The figures for it vary. JewishGen’s survey of 2000 estimates its area at about 2,500 m² with 20 to 100 gravestones, while Graiul Sălajului gives 7,209 m² and 162 graves, and notes that several stones are of high artistic value.

In 2014 the teacher Mirel Matyas, who documented the site for the community, described broken and overturned stones, a fence that offered no protection and a ruined tahara house. Some graves carry marble plaques with the names of family members murdered in the Holocaust, such as a plaque to Albert Ignác Weisz, who died in Auschwitz in 1944, on the grave of his wife Hermina, who died in 1941. According to an article in Realitatea Evreiască, the Federation’s journal, a monument to the deported Jews of Zalău stands in the cemetery, and a commemoration was held there on 9 October 2014, Romania’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.

A community reborn

For decades there was no organised community in Zalău. According to Realitatea Evreiască (December 2014), its revival was initiated by Dan Has, a native of the town who returned from abroad. After a notice in three local newspapers, more than 300 people came to the first meeting. The Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania approved the community in 2013; until then it had been attached to the Cluj community. Today the Federation’s website lists Zalău as an independent community, headed by Dan Has. The community is a partner in the educational project The Jewish Heritage of Sălaj, whose launch event was held in September 2026 at the museum in Șimleu Silvaniei.

Visiting

• The Jewish cemetery: in the Traian district. No official address or visiting hours are published.
• The synagogue site: the building was demolished in 1970, and we found no official source for its location.
• Șimleu Silvaniei and Cehei: the Northern Transylvania Holocaust Memorial Museum in the Șimleu Silvaniei synagogue, and the site of the former collection camp at Cehei.

Arrange a visit to the cemetery in advance with the Jewish Community of Zalău, whose office is at Str. Gheorghe Lazăr nr. 2 according to the Federation’s website, or with the Federation itself. A visit combines well with nearby Șimleu Silvaniei. We found no kosher food in the town, so bring supplies.