The Jews of Ieud: A Small, Learned Community in the Iza Valley

Ieud (Yiddish Yoed, Hungarian Jód), a Romanian village on the Ieud stream, a tributary of the Iza in Maramureș, was home to a small and learned Jewish community: a Mishnah society, a beit midrash and a Talmud Torah, and rabbis who wrote books. At the end of April 1944, under Hungarian rule, the village’s Jews were taken to the ghetto in neighbouring Dragomirești and from there to Auschwitz. In 1947 only 16 Jews were counted in the village.

Israel, the first Jew

According to the memorial book of the Maramureș communities, in the translation of JewishGen’s Yizkor Book Project, Ieud was a village whose inhabitants were all Romanians, about thirty kilometres south-east of Sighet. The first Jew recorded there is a man named Israel, listed in the 1728 census without family, who left after a short time. The 1746 census lists a Jew with his wife, three children and a servant, and the 1768 census four families, 14 people, who lived by distilling liquor and peddling.

The date the community was founded is not documented, and the memorial book suggests the early nineteenth century. The cemetery and the mikveh preceded the synagogue, which is first mentioned in the 1830 census. In that year 130 Jews lived in Ieud, 8.9% of the inhabitants. By 1920 their number had reached 360 (12.8%), but after the First World War economic hardship weighed on the community: 286 Jews remained in 1930 (10.1%), and 217 in 1941 (7.2%).

Study circles and a beit midrash

The small community had its own institutions. A Chevra Mishnayot was active by 1880, headed by Reb Israel Ganz. There was a Chevra Kadisha, whose gabbai in 1905 was Reb Shlomo Appel. Reb David Katz was gabbai of the beit midrash, and the Talmud Torah was run by a son of Reb Shmuel Markovitch.

Rabbis, scholars and natives

The memorial book names several scholars who grew up in Ieud or served there. Rabbi Yaakov Aryeh (Leib) Appel, a Vizhnitz Hasid who died in 1928, wrote the works Aron Betzalel and Eil Miluim, most of which were lost; his grandson David Appel published what survived in Tel Aviv in 1975. Rabbi Shlomo Greenfeld, son-in-law of Reb Welvel Appel, was known as a scholar. Rabbi Yechezkel Widman served briefly in Ieud and in Kechnia, was chosen rabbi of Săcel in 1922 and was murdered in the Holocaust. Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Markovitch, a scholar and thinker, became rabbi of Sculeni in Bessarabia and was murdered in Transnistria. Reb Izik Anshel was a shochet and a teacher of halakhic rulings.

Ieud also produced activists and writers. Yehuda Edelstein, a Zionist writer, settled in Cluj and taught at the Tarbut school, emigrated to the Land of Israel in 1925 and worked for the newspaper Haboker until 1959; he wrote a biography of Avraham Shapira. Hillel Roth, an Agudat Israel activist, ran a home for women Holocaust survivors in Sighet after the war, and died in 1977. The educator Chaim Mordechai Edelstein was also a native of the village.

The memorial book reconstructed the community’s history from censuses and documents: the entry’s sources include the document collection Magyar-Zsidó Oklevéltár (documents on the history of Hungarian Jewry), the responsa Arugat Habosem by Rabbi Moshe Greenwald (Svalyava, 1912) and Imrei Yosher by Rabbi Meir Arik (Kraków, 1928), and Naftali Ben-Menachem’s study of Jewish literature in Hungary (Jerusalem, 1958). In this way, from census lists and names in the margins of halakhic books, the memory of a community that numbered a few hundred people at its height has been preserved.

1940–1944: to the Dragomirești ghetto

In August 1940, under the Second Vienna Award, Maramureș was annexed with Northern Transylvania to Hungary. According to the memorial book, at the end of April 1944 the Jews of Ieud were rounded up and taken to the ghetto set up in Dragomirești, and from there deported to Auschwitz. The Dragomirești entry in the same book describes the fate of the ghetto: in mid-May the men were separated from the women, the elderly and the children and marched to the railway station at Vișeu de Jos, and the deportees reached Auschwitz on 18 May 1944. According to the Wiesel Commission, some 132,000 Jews from Northern Transylvania and Maramureș were deported to Auschwitz in those months.

After the war

Few returned. In 1947, 16 Jews were counted in Ieud. Most of them left the village, and most went to Israel. “Today there are no Jews in Ieud,” the memorial book states.

Visiting

• The cemetery: listed by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania (2007) under the Sighetu Marmației community, without a street address. According to the memorial book it was among the community’s first institutions. We found no recent description of its condition.
• Arrangements: no hours published. Contact the Jewish Community of Sighet in advance, Strada Basarabia 8, Sighetu Marmației, according to the Federation.
• Nearby: Dragomirești, site of the ghetto; Vișeu de Sus and Borșa; Sighet and the Elie Wiesel house.