The Jews of Gherla: Szamosújvár’s Synagogue and the Deportation Memorial

Gherla (Hungarian Szamosújvár), a small town on the Someș river between Cluj and Dej, was founded as an Armenian town, and Jews were allowed to live there only from the mid-19th century. Within two generations it had an Orthodox community of about a thousand, with a large synagogue, a Talmud Torah and a mikveh. In 1940 the town passed to Hungary, and in May 1944 its Jews and those of the surrounding villages were held in a ghetto, moved to the Cluj ghetto and deported from there to Auschwitz. The synagogue still stands, and beside it is a memorial bearing the names of more than a thousand of the victims.

An Armenian town opens to Jews

According to the history published by the “Jewish Community of Gherla”, an organisation of former residents abroad, Gherla was founded around 1700 by Armenians with the approval of Emperor Leopold I. At first Jews could live only in the surrounding villages, and nearby Iclod already had a large community in 1772. Only after the revolution of 1848 were Jews allowed to settle in the town itself. According to JewishGen’s Cemetery Discovery Project, the 1857 census counted 162 Jews. The Cluj newspaper Făclia, quoted by the site Actual de Cluj, dates the founding of the community to 1860. Until the 1870s the Jews of Gherla buried their dead in Iclod; then a cemetery was opened in the town.

The community was Orthodox. According to the same community history, its first chief rabbi was Yitzhak Yosef ha-Kohen, who served from 1880 until his death in 1920. He was succeeded by his son-in-law, Avraham Shlomo Elias, until his death in 1930, and then by Elias’s son Yaakov Shmuel Elias, who was deported in 1944 and died in a camp near Auschwitz in 1945. The community had a shochet, a chevra kadisha, charitable societies and a guesthouse for the poor, a Talmud Torah opened in 1922 and a new mikveh on the bank of the Someș from 1925. Mihaly Eisikovits, interviewed for the Centropa archive, remembered two synagogues, a large one and a small one, and a second rabbi who had fled Galicia and was known as “the rabbi from Kolomyya”. The 1930 census counted about a thousand Jews: 1,037 according to the community history, 1,019 according to JewishGen.

The synagogue on Strada Crișan

The synagogue stands at Strada Crișan 46, according to the list of synagogues of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, which dates it to 1911 and does not mark it as active. The community history, Făclia and Jewish Heritage Europe give the year 1903. Jewish Heritage Europe notes that the building is known for its painted ceiling. According to the community history, during the war the synagogue was used as a warehouse for property confiscated from Jews, and it was renovated in 1945 by those who returned.

In the following decades the building emptied and decayed. In June 2021 the Federation asked the town hall for help in restoring it, and in February 2022 the town council approved transferring it to municipal management for 25 years. According to Actual de Cluj, the 648 m² building has a stone foundation, brick walls and a tiled roof, and is “in an advanced state of deterioration”. The town hall announced that it would seek European Union funding to restore it and open it for cultural events. Ownership remains with the Federation. We found no official report that restoration work has begun.

1940–1944: on the Hungarian side of the border

Under the Second Vienna Award of August 1940, Gherla passed with the whole of Northern Transylvania to Hungary. Yad Vashem’s Pinkas HaKehillot Romania lists it in its section on the Jews of Northern Transylvania. According to the community history, in 1942 the town was the seat of a Hungarian labour-service draft board. In June 1942, 424 Jews from Cluj, Gherla and the surrounding area were called up; most were sent to the Eastern Front in Ukraine, and most did not return.

On 3 May 1944 the Jews of the town, together with those of the surrounding villages, were concentrated in a ghetto set up in a brickyard. According to the community history, about 1,600 people were crowded into it. The Institute for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, which helped identify the victims’ names, speaks of about 1,200 people from Gherla and nearby settlements. On 18 May the ghetto inmates were loaded onto cattle cars and taken to the Cluj ghetto, and from there, according to the community history, they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on 25 May 1944. Most were murdered. One family, the Patakis, was exempted and held under house arrest, and according to the same source saved most of the synagogue’s Torah scrolls.

After the war

According to the community history, about forty Jews returned, and the Joint supported a shelter and a communal kitchen set up for them. In 1947 there were 210 Jews in Gherla, many of them refugees from elsewhere. Then emigration began, mostly to Israel: 140 community members in 1956, 21 in 1966, and only four families in 1971. By 2002 one Jew remained in the town, the Holocaust survivor Zoltán Blum, who kept the keys to the synagogue and the cemetery. In 2015 he was made an honorary citizen of Gherla, and he later moved to his daughter in Oradea.

The memorial

On 22 May 2016 a memorial was dedicated beside the synagogue to the 1,600 Jews deported from Gherla, with a wall bearing the names of 1,040 identified victims. It also honours the townspeople who saved Jews. According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), its design evokes forced labour in stone quarries, and the project was coordinated by Alexandru Sommer, chairman of the Jewish Community of Gherla, and Mike Klein, a native of the town who emigrated to the United States. According to Jewish Heritage Europe, it was funded through the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, with donations from survivors and their descendants channelled through the Joint. Commemorations have been held at the memorial since then, for example in January 2020, on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. In 1971 former residents in Israel published a memorial book, Sefer zikaron shel kedoshei ayaratenu Szamosujvar-Iklad ve-ha-seviva, with a list of the victims.

The cemetery

According to the JewishGen survey of 2000 (updated in 2016), the Orthodox cemetery lies on a hillside on the edge of the town, near other cemeteries, enclosed by a fence with a locked gate. Between 100 and 500 gravestones of marble, granite and sandstone are visible, with inscriptions in Hebrew and Yiddish, and there is an ohel. The last known burial was in 1993. The land belongs to the Jewish community, and a local volunteer looks after the site.

Visiting

• Synagogue: Strada Crișan 46, according to the Federation. The building is not in use and is in poor condition; it and the memorial can be seen from outside. No opening hours are published.
• Cemetery: closed by a locked gate; no official address is published. Arrange your visit in advance.
• Arrangements: the Jewish Community of Cluj or the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania.
• On the way: Gherla lies on the road and railway between Cluj and Dej, and can be combined in one day with the synagogue and deportation memorial in Dej.