The Jews of Târnăveni: the synagogue of Dicsőszentmárton and Ligeti’s birthplace

Târnăveni (Hungarian Dicsőszentmárton), a small town on the Târnava Mică river in Mureș County, was the centre of an Orthodox community that also served the Jews of the surrounding villages. In 1940 the town stayed on the Romanian side of the new border, and its Jews lived through the war under Romania’s racial laws, without a ghetto and without deportation to Auschwitz. The synagogue, built in the late 19th or early 20th century, still stands and is now a venue for cultural events, a few metres from the house where the composer György Ligeti was born.

A community of town and villages

According to JewishGen’s Cemetery Project, 3 Jews lived in the town in 1850 and 45 in 1857; in 1880 there were 91. Jewish settlement in the area was at first rural. A register of births, marriages and deaths kept in Hungarian for 1836–1886, held by the National Archives in Mureș and described on the Leo Baeck Institute’s Archives of Jewish Bukovina and Transylvania site, records almost only events in the villages around the town, such as Adámos (Adămuș), not in the town itself. The officiants were rabbis, cantors and shochtim, sometimes with their place of residence noted.

In 1890 the statutes of the Orthodox Israelite Community of Dicsőszentmárton were approved in Budapest. According to the archive’s description, they set out the elections, dues, leadership and the running of the school, and placed the rural communities under the town community, to which they had to report their civil records. In the following decades the community grew with the town. According to the Târgu Mureș newspaper Népújság, 410 Jews by religion lived there in 1910; according to JewishGen there were 490 in 1920 and 530 in 1930.

The synagogue

The synagogue stands at Strada Republicii 65B, according to the list of synagogues of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania. The Federation and the 2010 survey by the US Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad both date it to the 19th century; a 2012 Népújság article gives the year 1902. The plaque on the building, in Hebrew and English, also states that the synagogue served the community for a century, from 1902 to 2001. The building is not among the synagogues the Federation lists as active.

According to the 2010 survey, the Federation let the building free of charge to a local cultural foundation, the Târnava Mică Cultural Foundation, in return for its commitment to renovate it. In 2012, according to Népújság, it housed a Hungarian cultural centre. Today the former synagogue is used for concerts and cultural events. In May 2025 Lukas Ligeti, the composer’s son, performed there as part of the Ligeti Festival Transilvania; the news agency Agerpres described the venue as “the Târnăveni Synagogue”, a few metres from his father’s birthplace. In June 2026 it hosted a jazz recital, and the local station Radio AS called the venue the “György Ligeti Cultural Centre”.

György Ligeti, a son of the town

György Ligeti, one of the leading composers of the second half of the 20th century, was born in Dicsőszentmárton on 28 May 1923 to a Jewish family. According to Agerpres, he spent his first six years in a small house a few metres from the synagogue, and the family’s original name was Auer. In 1929 the family moved to Cluj, where his father, Sándor, worked at a bank. Cluj lay in Northern Transylvania, which passed to Hungary in 1940, so it was there, not in his birthplace, that the family met the Holocaust. According to the Historical Museum Basel, his father died in 1945 in Bergen-Belsen, his brother Gábor was murdered the same year in Mauthausen, and his mother Ilona survived Auschwitz and returned to Cluj.

The war years: on the Romanian side of the border

Under the Second Vienna Award of August 1940, Northern Transylvania was handed to Hungary. Târnăveni remained in Romania, and Yad Vashem’s Pinkas HaKehillot Romania lists it among the communities of Southern Transylvania. There were no ghettos and no deportations to Auschwitz here, as there were north of the border, but the Jews suffered under the Romanian regime’s racial laws. The wartime files of the Târnăveni town hall, held by the National Archives in Mureș, document the 1941 “evacuation” of Jews from the villages to towns in the area, official posters announcing antisemitic laws, the seizure of radios and of objects “donated” to the authorities, the expropriation of property, and forced labour.

In 1942 the Antonescu government agreed with Germany on a plan to deport the Jews of Romania. According to the historian Victor Neumann, the first preparations were made in the cities of Southern Transylvania and the Banat, Arad, Timișoara and Turda, and the plan was cancelled that same year, thanks in part to the efforts of Chief Rabbi Alexandru Șafran and Jewish leaders in Bucharest.

After the war, and the cemeteries

From 1947 to 1950 the town had a Jewish Democratic Committee, the body set up under the communist regime. Its files in the Mureș archives include decisions on holidays, the Jewish school and religious staff, emigration matters and questions about people missing since the war. In 1948 the committee complained by telegram that the community was “sympathetic to Zionist revisionism”. Most Jews left in the following years. JewishGen’s survey of 2000 recorded fewer than ten Jews in the town, and in 2012 Népújság wrote that only one was known.

The town has two Orthodox Jewish cemeteries from the 19th century. According to JewishGen’s 2000 survey, each has 100 to 500 gravestones, and neither has ever been vandalised. The first, on a hillside, has a tahara house; access to the second is through private property and requires permission. JewishGen names among the town’s natives Rabbi Miksa Marton and Ernő Marton, editor of the Hungarian-language Jewish newspaper Új Kelet.

Visiting

• The former synagogue: Strada Republicii 65B, according to the Federation. Now used for cultural events. No opening hours are published; it can be entered mainly during events.
• The Ligeti house: the composer’s childhood home, a few metres from the synagogue. According to Agerpres (2022) it is used as a small industrial workshop and is not open to visitors.
• The cemeteries: two, with access to at least one by arrangement only.

There is no active community in the town today. Arrange a visit in advance with the Jewish Community of Târgu Mureș, at Aurel Filimon 23 according to the Federation, or with the Federation itself. Târnăveni lies between Târgu Mureș and Mediaș and fits easily into a route that takes in the synagogues of Târgu Mureș, Mediaș and Sighișoara. We found no kosher food in the town.