The Jews of Dragomirești: A Hasidic Community and the Iza Valley Ghetto

Dragomirești (Hungarian Drágomérfalva), a large village in the Iza valley of Maramureș, was home to a Hasidic community founded at the end of the eighteenth century, with a yeshiva called Daat Torah. In 1920 Jews were more than a quarter of its inhabitants. In spring 1944, under Hungarian rule, a ghetto was set up there, into which the Jews of the surrounding villages were also concentrated, and in May 1944 all were deported to Auschwitz.

The timber merchant and the Hasidim of Kosov

According to the memorial book of the Maramureș communities, translated into English by JewishGen’s Yizkor Book Project, Jews appear in Dragomirești as early as the 1746 census, without names. The 1768 census lists a Jew named Yaakov and a peddler named Moshe Hershkovitz, all from Galicia. The first Jew who clearly settled in the village was Reb Shmuel Stern, who arrived around 1780 and drew after him many Hasidim of the Kosov court, who worked in his timber, grain, cattle and dairy businesses.

The community organised itself at the end of the eighteenth century, and a Hasidic synagogue and a beit midrash, a mikveh and a cemetery soon followed. The 1830 census lists 21 Jewish heads of household, 82 people, 8.4% of the inhabitants. The community grew over the years: 671 Jews lived in the village in 1910 (25.7%), 756 in 1920 (28%), 739 in 1930 (23.3%) and 684 in 1941 (20.5%).

Rabbis and a yeshiva

The memorial book names several rabbis who served in Dragomirești. Reb Moshe Stern, born in 1852, served there from about 1880 to 1899 and then moved to another community. Reb Yitzchak Meir HaKohen Schwartz settled in the village around 1886 and lived there until his death in 1936, publishing several works. Reb Menachem Mendel Shapira was chosen rabbi of the region in 1911 and died in 1940.

Reb Moshe Israel Feldman was the only rabbi chosen officially, in 1921. He founded the Daat Torah yeshiva, which had about fifty select students. In 1944 he was deported with his community to Auschwitz and murdered there.

The oldest communal institution was the Chevra Kadisha, alongside which there were charitable societies and study circles: Chevra Shas, Chevra Mishnayot, Chevra Ein Yaakov and Chevra Tehillim. There was no organised Talmud Torah; children were taught by private teachers in heders, and the community supervised the examinations. The memorial book also lists the community’s leaders for 1869–1899 and from 1900 to the First World War, the record of a community that ran its own affairs.

1940–1944: a ghetto in the village centre

In August 1940, under the Second Vienna Award, Northern Transylvania and Maramureș were annexed to Hungary, and Hungarian anti-Jewish legislation applied to the Jews of Dragomirești as well. After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the registration and concentration of the region’s Jews began.

According to the memorial book, the village’s Jews were moved into a ghetto on the last day of Passover 5704, 15 April 1944. The ghetto was set up in the centre of the village, and the Hungarian authorities also concentrated there the Jews of the surrounding villages: Rozavlea, Săcel, Săliștea, Ieud and Botiza. The Ieud entry in the same book adds that the Jews of Ieud were rounded up at the end of April 1944 and taken to the Dragomirești ghetto. Families were crammed into Jewish homes, stables and barns. The gendarmes set up a Jewish police force, and a Judenrat distributed food.

On 14 May the men aged 12 to 60 were separated from the women, the elderly and the children. The men were held in the school and the others in the synagogue, and both groups were plundered. The next day, 15 May, the men were marched about 25 kilometres to the railway station at Vișeu de Jos (Unterwischau), and many died or were killed on the way. The women, children and elderly were taken by wagon and on foot. According to the memorial book, the deportees reached Auschwitz on 18 May 1944, 26 Iyar 5704. According to the Wiesel Commission, some 132,000 Jews from Northern Transylvania and Maramureș were deported to Auschwitz in May–June 1944.

The account of the ghetto was written largely by Chaim Israel Perl, a native of nearby Șieu, based on his manuscript about his own community. His book Extinguished Candles in Maramureș was published in Tel Aviv in 1958.

After the war

According to the memorial book, about fifty survivors returned to Dragomirești. Within a short time they too left, most of them for Israel. “Today there is no Jewish community in Dragomirești,” the book states.

Visiting

• The cemetery: listed by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania (2007) under the Sighetu Marmației community, without a street address. We found no recent description of its condition.
• The synagogue: the memorial book includes a photograph of the synagogue, but we found no current source on the fate of the building.
• Arrangements: no hours published. Contact the Jewish Community of Sighet in advance, Strada Basarabia 8, Sighetu Marmației, according to the Federation.
• Nearby: Ieud, whose Jews were concentrated in the Dragomirești ghetto; Vișeu de Sus and Borșa in the Vișeu valley; Sighet and the Elie Wiesel house.