The Jews of Bistrița: From the Stamboli Farm to the Concert Hall

Bistrița — Bistritz to the Saxons, Beszterce to the Hungarians — is the northernmost Saxon town in Transylvania. Jews were allowed to settle there only after 1848, yet within two generations an Orthodox and Hasidic community of more than 2,000 grew up, and between the world wars the town housed the central office of Orthodox Jewry in Transylvania. In June 1944 the Jews of the town and county were sent from a ghetto on the Stamboli farm to Auschwitz.

A town that opened late

Bistrița was founded by Saxon settlers in the Middle Ages, and for centuries it was a German-speaking town, joined gradually by Romanians and Hungarians. As in the other Saxon towns, Jews were not allowed to live there. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, settlement became possible only after the restrictions were lifted in the wake of the 1848 revolution, and most of the settlers came from Bukovina and Galicia. The beginnings were modest: according to the JewishGen Cemetery Discovery Project survey, 229 Jews lived in the town in 1869–1870 and 378 in 1880.

Rapid growth followed. The Encyclopaedia Judaica counts 718 Jews in Bistrița in 1891, 1,316 in 1900, 2,198 in 1930 — about 15% of the population — and 2,358 in 1941. The community was Orthodox with a strong Hasidic element, although some of its members adopted German and Hungarian language and culture. Jews worked in trade, crafts and the professions, and the town served as a centre for the village communities of the county.

An Orthodox centre and a Zionist cradle

Bistrița holds a special place in the history of Hungarian Zionism: in 1901 Nissan Kahan founded Ivriyah there, which the Encyclopaedia Judaica describes as the first Zionist youth organisation in Hungary. In the First World War, 138 Jews from the town were called up.

After the war, when Transylvania passed to Romania, the central office of Orthodox Jewry in Transylvania was established in Bistrița. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, which reproduces the Encyclopaedia Judaica text, it represented about 80 communities with some 135,000 people, and was headed by Rabbi Solomon Zalman Ullmann until his death in 1930. A large yeshivah operated in the town, and between the wars Zionism was a central force in community life. According to the JewishGen survey, Rabbi Meir Spitz served as the community’s rabbi from 1912 to 1944.

The synagogue: from stable to concert hall

The great synagogue, on Strada General Grigore Bălan, is today one of the most prominent buildings in the town centre. Sources disagree on when it was built: Radio Romania International, the newspaper Adevărul and the foundation that runs the building give 1856, while the Destroyed Communities centre of Holocaust Museum Houston dates the synagogue to 1893. The later date fits the population figures better — fewer than 250 Jews lived in the town in 1869 — but we found no archival source that settles the question. Radio Romania describes the style as a blend of Neo-Gothic and Romanesque.

According to the same report, during the Hungarian years (1940–1944) army horses were kept in the synagogue, and the community archive was burned during the Hungarian retreat. After the war, as the community dwindled, the building stood unused for almost fifty years and decayed. Restoration began in 2000 with a gift of about $170,000 from an American Jew whose family came from the town, according to Radio Romania. The Federation of Jewish Communities later handed the building on a long-term loan to the Bistrița “Concert Society” Cultural Foundation (Fundația Culturală „Societatea de Concerte”), which completed the work: according to the foundation, electricity, gas and water were installed for the first time, a stage was built, the 150-year-old benches were repaired and the wall paintings renewed. Adevărul adds that the work was also funded by the European Commission and the US Embassy.

The hall, reopened in 2007 — in September, according to Radio Romania, with a performance of Carmina Burana — now hosts concerts, exhibitions and screenings, and according to Adevărul seats about 300. Services are rarely held, because the town no longer has a minyan. The building is protected as a historic monument.

1941–1944: from Kamenets-Podolsk to the Stamboli farm

In August 1940, under the Second Vienna Award, northern Transylvania, including Bistrița, was handed to Hungary. As early as 1941, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the Hungarian authorities deported several dozen Jewish families from the town to Kamenets-Podolsk in Ukraine, where they were murdered. Men of military age were taken into forced-labour companies, and the whole community was hemmed in by restrictions.

After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 came the ghetto. In early May the Jews of Bistrița were concentrated on the Stamboli farm, about three kilometres from the town according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Jews from the small towns and villages of Beszterce-Naszód county were brought there too, and at its peak the ghetto held close to 6,000 people, in barracks and pigsties. It was emptied in two transports to Auschwitz-Birkenau, on 2 and 6 June 1944. Most of the deportees were murdered on arrival.

In 1946 a memorial to the deportees was erected in the town, designed by I. Flontas: a four-metre prism of black marble on a base set within a concrete Star of David. According to the Bistrița city website, it commemorates about 7,000 Jewish men, women and children from the county who were murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps.

After the war and today

In 1947 about 1,300 Jews lived in Bistrița: camp survivors, people from the surrounding villages and those who returned from Transnistria and elsewhere. In the following decades most of them emigrated to Israel, the United States and Canada, and by 2002 only 15 Jews, mostly elderly, remained. According to the city website the community today has 19 members, most of them over 70; they gather on the holidays, and light memorial candles for their loved ones at the community offices.

The cemeteries

According to the JewishGen Cemetery Discovery Project survey of 2000, the town has two Jewish cemeteries. The larger, at Strada Ghinzii 48, was founded in the 19th century and covers about 300 by 100 metres. It holds between 500 and 5,000 gravestones of marble, granite, sandstone and limestone, inscribed in Hebrew and Yiddish. It is fenced and locked, with the caretaker’s house on the grounds. The second, at Strada Năsăudului 100, is very small — about 8 by 10 metres — and according to the survey contains marked mass graves and Holocaust memorials.

Across the county lie dozens of cemeteries of vanished village communities. According to Adevărul, at the end of 1987 the community was responsible for about 70 cemeteries in the county, 52 of them closed, and many have been neglected.

Visiting

• The synagogue — Strada General Grigore Bălan 10, according to the foundation that runs it. Now a concert hall; entry during events or by arrangement.
• Community offices — Strada General Grigore Bălan 9, per the Federation’s website; tel. +40 740 173 317.
• The cemetery — Strada Ghinzii 48; the gate is locked, so arrange in advance.
• The 1946 memorial — we found no reliable source giving its exact location; ask the community.

We found no opening hours published by a reliable source. Arrange your visit in advance with the Bistrița community or with the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania. There is no kosher restaurant in the town, so plan ahead.