The Jews of Huedin: A Yeshiva, a Synagogue and the Road to Cluj

Huedin (Hungarian Bánffyhunyad), a town on the road between Cluj and Oradea, was home to a Jewish community that built its first synagogue in 1852 and kept a yeshiva. In 1910 Jews were about a fifth of the town’s population. In 1940 Huedin was annexed to Hungary with Northern Transylvania, and in May 1944 its Jews were arrested, taken to the Cluj ghetto and deported to Auschwitz. The community’s two cemeteries are registered with the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania.

A community on a trade route

According to the communities database of ANU – Museum of the Jewish People and Yad Vashem’s Pinkas HaKehillot Romania, Jews began settling in Huedin in the first half of the 19th century. The first synagogue was built in 1852. The community grew quickly: 243 Jews lived in the town in 1877, and 1,073 by 1910, about 22% of the population.

The community’s memorial book, My Memories of Banffy-Hunyad, edited by Eliezer Laci Klepner (Tel Aviv, 1990), has chapters on the Jews’ place in the town’s economy and on its Zionist movements. It has been translated into English by JewishGen’s Yizkor Book Project.

The yeshiva

The community kept a yeshiva which, according to the Pinkas, was well known. The Pinkas notes that Professor Isaiah Tishby, later a scholar of Kabbalah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, began his studies there. The sources we checked do not name the town’s rabbis or the heads of the yeshiva.

Between the wars

After 1918 Huedin, with the rest of Transylvania, passed to Romania. In 1927 a group of antisemitic students attacked the town’s synagogue, according to the ANU database; the memorial book has a chapter called “The pogrom of the students”. The 1930 census recorded 960 Jews in Huedin. After the Goga–Cuza government came to power in December 1937, antisemitic legislation took effect in Romania.

1940–1944: under Hungarian rule

In August 1940, under the Second Vienna Award, Northern Transylvania, including Huedin, was annexed to Hungary, and Hungarian anti-Jewish legislation was applied at once. According to the Pinkas, in 1942 Jewish men of military age in the Cluj district were drafted into labour units and sent to the Eastern Front.

After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, it was the turn of Huedin’s Jews. According to the ANU database, on 3 May 1944 the Hungarian police arrested the town’s Jews and held them in the local synagogue, where they were tortured. A few days later they were moved to the Cluj ghetto, and in May–June 1944 they were deported to Auschwitz. According to the Wiesel Commission, about 132,000 Jews from Northern Transylvania were deported to Auschwitz in those months.

The Cluj ghetto was set up in the city’s old brickworks. According to Actual de Cluj, drawing on material from the Northern Transylvania Holocaust Memorial Museum, ghettoisation began on 3 May 1944, the same day Huedin’s Jews were arrested. At its peak the ghetto held about 18,000 people, the Jews of Cluj and those of Huedin, Gherla and the surrounding villages, among them about 4,000 children under 13. Six trains left for Auschwitz, the first on 25 May and the last in early June 1944. Most of those deported were murdered on arrival.

Huedin’s memorial book records the period in chapters on the Vienna Award, the general mobilisation, 19 March 1944, the day Germany occupied Hungary, and “Banfi-Hunyad on 3 May 1944”. Its second part is a necrology of the community’s victims.

After the war

In 1947, 345 Jews lived in Huedin, survivors who had returned. In the years that followed most of them left, many for Israel. Those who stayed formed a local community that was a member of the Federation, and according to the ANU database one Jew remained in the town in 2014. Today Huedin’s cemeteries belong to the Jewish Community of Cluj, according to the Federation’s list.

Visiting

• Cemeteries: the Federation’s 2007 cemetery list names two cemeteries, Huedin I and Huedin II, both on Strada E. Varga. We found no recent description of their condition.
• Synagogue: we found no recent source on what became of the synagogue, and it is not on the Federation’s list of synagogues.
• Arrangements: no hours are published. The cemeteries belong to the Jewish Community of Cluj, Strada Tipografiei 25, according to the Federation; contact it in advance.
• Nearby: Cluj, with its Memorial Temple of the Deportees; Gherla; Zalău; Oradea.