The Jews of Aiud: A Small Community in the Mureș Valley

Aiud — Nagyenyed in Hungarian, Straßburg am Mieresch in German — is a small town in the valley of the Aiud river, about thirty kilometres north-east of Alba Iulia. Its Jewish community was never large; at its height it numbered about five hundred people. What remains is chiefly a cemetery and registers of births, marriages and deaths kept in the county archives. Verified material on the community is thin, and what follows rests on archival sources and surveys.

A Town in Alba Iulia’s Shadow

For two centuries Jewish settlement in Transylvania was concentrated in the nearby capital: according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the Approbatae Constitutiones of 1653 restricted Jewish residence in the principality to Alba Iulia. Population figures compiled by JewishGen’s Cemetery Discovery Project from censuses and historical studies show a small Jewish presence in Aiud in the 19th century: 38 Jews in 1838, 43 in 1850–1851 and 81 in 1857. After emancipation in 1867 the community grew: 177 Jews in 1869–1870, 437 in 1920 and 464 in 1930.

What the Registers Tell

The most continuous evidence of community life is its civil registers, held by the Alba County branch of the National Archives in Alba Iulia and described by the Leo Baeck Institute’s Archives of Jewish Bukovina and Transylvania (JBAT). The death register covers 1857–1877 and includes deaths in the surrounding villages. The register of births, marriages and deaths begins in 1886; headings and entries are in Hungarian, but around 1900 many entries include substantial Hebrew, and a few are written entirely in Hebrew. The National Archives titled one register “Israelite-Orthodox Head Rabbinate”, but the Leo Baeck archivists rejected the title because it does not appear in the book itself. Records of 1885–1886 from the communities of Aiud and neighbouring Teiuș were kept together, a sign of the ties between the small communities of the Mureș valley.

An exhibition by the county archives on the Jewish communities of Alba County, shown in 2014, also included documents of a Jewish school in Aiud, among them a grade register.

The Synagogues

We found no detailed study of Aiud’s synagogues. According to the Jewish Romania website, the first synagogue was in a private house, which became a synagogue in 1889, and in 1912 a new Neolog synagogue was built. The JewishGen survey describes the cemetery as Orthodox and Neolog, which suggests that both streams were present in the town. No synagogue in Aiud appears in the Federation’s list of synagogues or in the 2010 report of the US Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. We found no reliable source on the fate or location of the buildings, so we give no address.

The War Years

After the Second Vienna Award in August 1940 Aiud, like Alba Iulia and Turda, remained in Southern Transylvania under Romanian rule. The Jews of Northern Transylvania, which passed to Hungary, were deported to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944; there was no mass deportation of the Jews of Southern Transylvania, but they suffered under the Antonescu regime’s anti-Jewish laws, confiscations and forced labour. The Aiud community continued to exist as an organised body: the Leo Baeck Institute holds its budget reports for 1942–1943, submitted to the Centrala Evreilor din România, the body the regime set up to control the Jews. We found no source describing what happened to Aiud’s Jews themselves in these years, so we add no details.

The Cemetery

According to the JewishGen Cemetery Discovery Project survey carried out by historian Lucian Nastasă in 2000, the Jewish cemetery lies on a hillside within the town, about two kilometres from the synagogue that used it. It was founded in the 19th century, and the last burial took place in 1992. Between 100 and 500 stones of marble, granite, limestone and sandstone remain, inscribed in Hebrew, Romanian and Hungarian; according to the survey, more than three-quarters of them are toppled or broken. It is fenced, with a locked gate, and has no sign. The plot belongs to the Jewish Community of Alba Iulia, and at the time of the survey fewer than ten Jews lived in the town. The US Commission also documented the cemetery in 2010, noting vegetation and weathering of the stones.

Visiting

• Cemetery: the gate is locked, so arrange a visit in advance.
• Arrangements: the Jewish Community of Alba Iulia, which is responsible for the cemetery — Strada Tudor Vladimirescu 4, Alba Iulia, tel. +40 258 817 840 per the Federation’s website.
• Nearby: Alba Iulia — the Mareh Yehezkel synagogue and the old cemetery; Turda — the Great Synagogue.