The Jews of Dej: the Paneth Rabbis, the Bungur Forest and the Temple of Brotherhood

Dej — Dés to Hungarian speakers, “Deyzh” in Yiddish — is a town on the Someș river, about sixty kilometres north of Cluj. On the eve of the Holocaust Jews made up about a fifth of its population: an Orthodox and Hasidic community led for three generations by rabbis of the Paneth family. In May 1944 the Jews of the town and its surroundings were concentrated in the Bungur forest outside Dej, and sent from there to Auschwitz.

A young community that grew fast

Until the mid-19th century Jews were not allowed to live in Dej itself and settled in the surrounding villages. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, settlement in the town began in 1834, and the ban was formally lifted in 1848. After 1848 many immigrants arrived from Galicia, and they shaped the community’s character: Orthodox, with a strong Hasidic presence, speaking Yiddish and Hungarian. According to Ladislau Gyémánt’s entry in the YIVO Encyclopedia, there were 122 Jews in the town in 1857, 1,114 in 1890, and 3,360 in 1930 — 22.2% of the population. In 1941, 3,719 Jews lived in Dej.

After the great schism of Hungarian Jewry in 1868–1869, the community chose the Orthodox camp. It was led by rabbis of the Paneth family: Menachem Mendel Paneth (1862–1885), Moshe (1886–1903), Yechezkel (1903–1929) and Yaakov Elimelech Paneth, who served from 1930 until the destruction in 1944. The town was also known as the seat of a Hasidic court — “Deyzh” to its Hasidim.

The synagogues

The first synagogue was founded in the 1860s — the Encyclopaedia Judaica gives 1863, Gyémánt 1864. Early in the 20th century a new, larger synagogue was built, and the old one passed to the town’s roughly 250 Hasidic families. The sources also differ on the date of the new building: the Encyclopaedia Judaica and the places-of-worship database of the Romanian Institute for Cultural Memory (CIMEC) give 1907, while Gyémánt and the German memorial foundation Stiftung Denkmal give 1909. This is the building that still stands at Strada Înfrățirii 1, officially the “Înfrățirea” Temple — the “Temple of Brotherhood”. Alongside the synagogues the town had yeshivot, 14 heders, a Talmud Torah (from 1923) and a Jewish elementary school, and from 1894 a Hebrew printing press that produced 14 books.

Dej was the birthplace of the writer Meir Yehuda Majerovits and the painter Éva Lázár, and the physician and writer Nathan Friedländer was active there. The community’s memorial book records that Lázár’s last painting showed the march to the ghetto.

1941–1944: the road to the Bungur forest

In September 1940 northern Transylvania, Dej included, returned to Hungarian rule. Restrictions and conscription for forced labour followed at once. According to Stiftung Denkmal, in July 1941 about ten Jewish families who could not prove Hungarian citizenship were deported to Kamianets-Podilskyi in Ukraine and murdered there. In July 1942, 70 men were drafted into Hungarian army labour companies, and most of them died on the Eastern Front.

After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944 a ghetto was ordered. According to the memorial book, the first proposal was to concentrate the Jews in Kodor Street, the Jewish quarter, but the town council preferred the Bungur forest, about three kilometres from town. On 3 May 1944 some 3,700 Jews of Dej and about 4,000 Jews from the towns and villages of Szolnok-Doboka county were brought there. There were no buildings and no running water; people put up tents of sheets and blankets, and many slept in the open. The bread ration was 160 grams a day. Police and Arrow Cross men tortured prisoners in a nearby house to find out where they had hidden valuables, and according to Stiftung Denkmal 25 people died in the ghetto. On the eve of the first transport two of the town’s doctors took their own lives.

The ghetto was cleared in three transports to Auschwitz-Birkenau — on 28 May, 6 June and 8 June 1944. According to Gyémánt, 7,674 Jews were deported from Bungur. Most were murdered on arrival.

After the war

In 1946 the community was re-established by 239 survivors, and by 1947 it numbered about a thousand people — some of them from the surrounding small towns. On 4 June 1947 a bronze memorial to the deportees by the sculptor Márton Izsák was dedicated in front of the synagogue — one of the earliest Holocaust memorials raised in Europe. In the following decades most of the Jews emigrated to Israel. By the early 21st century only a handful remained — about thirty in 2003 according to Gyémánt, fewer than ten in 2004 according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica. In 2004, sixty years after the deportation, a memorial service was held in the synagogue and wreaths were laid at the memorial, with the mayor and the Chief Rabbi of Bucharest, Dr Asher Ehrenfeld, taking part.

The cemetery

The Jewish cemetery lies on a hillside at Strada Tibleșului 16. According to a 2000 survey for JewishGen’s cemetery project, it covers about 5,800 m², is fenced with a locked gate, and holds many hundreds of marble, granite and sandstone stones inscribed in Hebrew, Hungarian and Romanian, as well as several ohalim. It contains a marked mass grave and a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. The survey gives 1951 as the date of the last burial.

Visiting

• The “Înfrățirea” synagogue — Strada Înfrățirii 1. Visits by prior arrangement only.
• The deportees’ memorial (1947) — in front of the synagogue; Stiftung Denkmal gives the address as Piața Ștefan cel Mare, and it is accessible at all times.
• The cemetery — Strada Tibleșului 16; the gate is locked, so arrange in advance.
• The Bungur forest — the site of the ghetto, about three kilometres from town.

We found no opening hours published by a reliable source. According to the website of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, the Dej community’s address is Strada Înfrățirii 3, tel. +40 264 215 179; you can also contact the Cluj community (+40 264 433 470). There is no kosher restaurant in town, so bring supplies.