The Jews of Arad: From Chorin’s Reform to the Deportation That Never Came

Arad, the fortress town on the Mureș, was one of the centres of Reform in Hungarian Jewry in the early 19th century, and in the Holocaust one of the communities saved at the last moment from deportation to Bełżec. In 1947 it had 13,200 Jews; today a few hundred remain, with synagogues and six cemeteries.

Two families in the shadow of the fortress

Arad was in Ottoman hands from 1552 to 1687 and then passed to the Kingdom of Hungary under Habsburg rule. The first Jewish record dates from 1717: according to the Leo Baeck Institute’s JBAT archive, the commander of the fortress then allowed two families to settle in the town, and according to the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) a passport survives from that year issued to two Jews living in the suburbs. A burial society was active from 1729, and its first statutes were written in 1750. In 1743 six families were counted (or six Jews, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia), and by 1754 there were 24 families, who paid their rabbi and teacher, Jacob Isaac, 36 florins a year. Jews made their living chiefly by producing and selling spirits and by trading in grain.

Aaron Chorin and Emek ha-Shaveh

The community rose to prominence with the election of Aaron Chorin as rabbi in 1789. Chorin, a native of Moravia educated at the yeshivahs of Mattersdorf and Prague, published Emek ha-Shaveh in Prague in 1803; in its first part, Rosh Amanah, he argued that spiritual leaders had the authority to modify customs. The controversy was immediate. Rabbi Mordecai Banet of Nikolsburg pressed the Arad community to ban the book, and a rabbinical court convened in Óbuda in September 1805 ordered Chorin to retract in writing. Chorin turned to the authorities, and on 24 June 1806 the imperial government annulled the verdict.

His reforms advanced step by step: abolishing kapparot, permitting rice and pulses on Passover, and later an organ in the synagogue, prayer in the vernacular and shorter mourning. His opponents mockingly called him “Aher”, the name given to Elisha ben Abuyah. The Encyclopaedia Judaica names him, with Leopold Löw, as one of the two leading spokesmen of the Reform movement in Hungary. Late in life he backed the resolutions of the Reform rabbinical conference in Brunswick.

Chorin also championed education and the crafts. In 1831 he wrote that seventy-eight young men had gone out to learn various trades, and some had turned to law and medicine. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, by 1841 the community had about a hundred skilled artisans. In 1832, on his initiative, a Jewish school opened in which Hungarian was compulsory, one of the first Jewish schools officially recognised in Hungary. Chorin died in 1844 and was buried in Arad. For the building he created, see our story on the Neolog synagogue.

Hungarians of the Mosaic faith

In 1848 the Jews of Arad worked in 21 crafts and traded in grain, tobacco, wool and cattle, and in banking; the town had ten Jewish physicians. In 1850 the community numbered 3,418, 15.2 per cent of the population. In the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848–1849 many Jews took part in the revolution, and after its suppression the Austrian military government imposed a collective fine of 2.3 million guilders on the Jewish communities, later reduced to one million. Arad itself is engraved in Hungarian memory as the place where the thirteen generals of the revolutionary army were executed on 6 October 1849. In the sources we checked we found no concrete record of the part played by the Jews of Arad in particular.

After the emancipation of 1867 many of the town’s Jews saw themselves as “Hungarians of the Mosaic faith”. After the Jewish Congress of 1868–1869 the main community joined the Neolog stream. A separate Orthodox community was founded, according to JBAT, in 1904, and its synagogue was dedicated in 1930. In 1890 the Jewish music society “Filharmonia” was founded, and the cultural figures JBAT associates with the town include the painter Izidor Kaufmann and the sculptor Jakab Guttmann. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that Dr Ferenc Sarkany served as mayor. In 1910 Arad had 6,295 Jews.

In Romania, between the wars

In 1919 Arad passed to Romania. The “Jewish Party” won votes here in parliamentary elections, and support for Zionism grew. Antisemitism grew alongside it. In 1930 the town had 7,811 Jews, and from 1933 a centre for aiding Jewish refugees operated here.

The Second World War: the deportation that was called off

Under the Second Vienna Award of August 1940, Arad remained in southern Transylvania, under Romania. Under the Antonescu regime Jewish property was confiscated, and in 1941 all Jewish men aged 18 to 55 were drafted into forced-labour battalions. In 1941–1942 the Jews of the surrounding villages and small towns were forcibly concentrated in the town, and the Jewish population rose to about 9,400. In May 1942 a special census of Jews was taken, which the historian Radu Ioanid describes as a racial census.

In the summer of 1942, according to the report of the Wiesel Commission, the Antonescu regime agreed in writing to deport the Jews of the Regat and southern Transylvania to Bełżec, and the deportation was to begin with the Jews of Arad, Timișoara and Turda. Many rescue efforts were made behind the scenes, among them by Wilhelm Filderman, the leader of Romanian Jewry, the Arad industrialist Baron Franz Neumann, Metropolitan Nicolae Bălan and the Queen Mother Helen. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica and JewishGen, the deportation order was rescinded on 11 October 1942. According to the Wiesel Commission, the postponement was conveyed to the Germans in November, and the plan was finally shelved in the spring of 1943.

In the summer of 1944 Jewish refugees from Hungary and northern Transylvania passed through Arad. In August–September 1944, as the front reached the area, most of the town’s Jews fled to Timișoara. Together with most of the Jews of the Regat and southern Transylvania, they survived the war.

From 13,200 to a few hundred

After the war the community grew to 13,200 in 1947, but it has shrunk steadily since, mainly through emigration to Israel. About 4,000 remained in 1969, about 500 in 1993 and about 380 in 2000. The Neolog and Orthodox communities were merged. Chief Rabbi József Miklós Schönfeld emigrated to Israel in 1961.

The community and its cemeteries today

The Jewish Community of Arad, headed by Raoul Vizental, is based at Strada Tribunul Dobra 10, in the Neolog synagogue building. A JewishGen survey lists six Jewish cemeteries in the town. The most important is the old Neolog cemetery, from the 19th century: about three hectares and more than 5,000 gravestones with Hebrew, Hungarian and Romanian inscriptions, ohalim, a tahara house and a 1960 Holocaust memorial bearing 244 names. One Orthodox cemetery was destroyed by the Communist authorities in 1975–1976 and built over.

The small community also faces new threats. In May 2025 gravestones in the large Jewish cemetery in the Grădiște district were desecrated with inscriptions of a Legionary character; police investigated an extremist group that had recruited two minors online. In March 2025 it was reported that Rabbi Chorin’s portrait bust, stolen from his grave in 1997, had been found in Austria and returned.

Visiting

The community office is at Strada Tribunul Dobra 10; the telephone number listed by the Federation of Jewish Communities is +40 257 281 310. Visits to the synagogue and the cemeteries are arranged in advance. The old Neolog cemetery is entered from Strada Toporaș 4. According to the community’s website it is closed on Shabbat, on holidays, on Rosh Hodesh and throughout the month of Nisan; hours on other days are posted there. From Arad it is easy to continue to Timișoara, about an hour’s drive south.