The Jews of Marghita: The Weinberger Yeshiva Town of Northern Bihor

Marghita (Hungarian Margitta), a town in northern Bihor County, was known in Yiddish as Margaretten, and its name travelled far thanks to its yeshiva and the rabbinic dynasty of the Weinberger family. The community, Orthodox from the start, made up more than a quarter of the town’s population in 1930. In May–June 1944, under Hungarian rule, its Jews were deported through the Oradea ghetto to Auschwitz, and the cemetery on the hill is almost all that remains of them.

Early Settlement

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Jews settled in Marghita in the 18th century, probably from the neighbouring village of Petra (as the Encyclopaedia spells it), and a geographical-historical description of Hungary from 1799 already mentions Jewish inhabitants. The community’s memorial book, published in 1979 and edited by Aharon Kleinmann, cites a 1721 document from the Hungarian archives according to which the town’s Jews fled to Oradea and Carei during an uprising and later returned.

According to the memorial book, a wooden prayer house was built in the town around 1742. In 1861 it was demolished and a new synagogue rose in its place; the Encyclopaedia Judaica dates the synagogue to 1862. An 1872 account mentions “a beautiful temple” and a Jewish school, and that year, according to the memorial book, about 700 Jews lived in Marghita out of 3,900 inhabitants. The burial society was founded in 1840, and in 1885 the community became the official centre for the Jews of the surrounding area.

The Rabbis and the Yeshiva

The community was Orthodox from the beginning. In the first half of the 19th century it was led by Rabbi Joshua Aaron Zevi Weinberger, author of the Mahariaẓ responsa, and according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica his descendants held the town’s rabbinate until the community was destroyed. In 1850 Rabbi Hillel Lichtenstein also served here briefly.

Students came to the Marghita yeshiva from far away, and at times, according to the Encyclopaedia, it numbered up to 350. The last rabbi, Rabbi Mordecai Azriel Weinberger, was also the yeshiva’s last head, and he perished in the Holocaust. Between the two world wars Hasidic influence grew in the town as Hasidic families and rabbis settled there, and a Jewish press was also active. The memorial book names among the Hasidic rabbis who settled in the town after the First World War R. Eizik Lefkovits, R. Avraham Chaim Glick and R. Chaim Spitzer. Most young men, according to the book, studied with local rabbis, and only some went to yeshivas in distant cities.

A Town One Quarter Jewish

The community grew steadily: in 1900, 944 Jews lived in Marghita, 18% of the population, and by 1930 there were 1,623, or 26.7%. The memorial book devotes chapters to Petri Street, the promenade, the Zionist movements and sporting and cultural life, sketching a town where community life, the yeshiva and trade were woven together.

1940–1944: Under Hungarian Rule

Under the Second Vienna Award of August 1940, Marghita was annexed to Hungary with Northern Transylvania. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the town’s Jews soon found that Hungarian antisemitism, official and public, was no better than the Romanian variety they had known between the wars. Young men were drafted into the forced-labour companies of the Hungarian army, and the memorial book devotes a whole chapter to them.

After the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the Jews of Marghita, together with the Jews of the surrounding villages, were concentrated in the Oradea ghetto. In May–June 1944 they were deported from there to Auschwitz, together with about 132,000 Jews of Northern Transylvania, according to the Wiesel Commission. Most were murdered on arrival. In 1947, according to the Encyclopaedia, about 500 Jews had returned to the town, but most emigrated to Israel or elsewhere, and by 1970 about ten Jewish families remained in Marghita. The memorial book closes with the list of names of the victims.

The Memorial Book

The Memorial Book of the Community of Margaretten and the Vicinity was published in 1979 on the initiative of former residents and translated into English through JewishGen’s Yizkor Book Project. Besides the community’s history it includes chapters on the rabbis, the community’s institutions, forced labour, the deportation and the “life that resurged” after the war, as well as a chapter on the villages around Marghita whose Jews were tied to the community. At the time of writing, according to the book, Ferenc Wollner was perhaps the last Jew still living in the town.

Visiting

• The Jewish cemetery: Strada Brândușei 10, according to the Federation’s list. It lies on a hillside at the edge of town, and according to a 2000 survey covers about 120 by 180 metres, with hundreds of gravestones inscribed in Hebrew and Hungarian, the oldest from the first half of the 19th century, and small concrete ohels.
• Access: the cemetery is fenced and its gate locked, and no hours are published. It belongs to the Jewish Community of Oradea, according to the Federation, which should be contacted in advance.
• Nearby: Oradea, with its synagogues and the memorial to the deportees; Valea lui Mihai; Șimleu Silvaniei, with the Northern Transylvania Holocaust Memorial Museum; Carei; Salonta.