The Jews of Oradea: From Four Settlers to the Great Ghetto

On the eve of the Holocaust more than twenty thousand Jews lived in Oradea, Nagyvárad in Hungarian, about a fifth of the city. In May 1944 some 35,000 Jews were confined here in two ghettos, the largest in Hungary outside Budapest. Within five weeks almost all of them were sent to Auschwitz.

Beginnings: four Jews below the fortress

Documents of 1407 and 1489 mention Jews connected with the city, but according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica the first reliable evidence of permanent settlement dates from the early 18th century. In 1722 four Jews were registered in the city; in 1731 a burial society was founded; and in 1736 ten families were recorded, including a cantor. The settlers came from Moravia, Bohemia and Poland and lived in the Váralja (Subcetate) quarter below the fortress.

In 1787 the Jews received permission to build a synagogue, and a second followed in 1812. According to Tikvah, the Oradea Jewish heritage site, the first Jewish school opened as early as 1786, the same year as the hekdesh, a charitable infirmary that became a hospital in 1856.

The 19th century: from a thousand to ten thousand

In 1840 the community numbered about 1,600. Many of the city’s Jews supported the Hungarian revolution of 1848–1849. In 1851 Jews were admitted to the merchants’ guild, and from then on they became a major force in the city’s economy. According to Tikvah, Jewish entrepreneurs ran the first omnibus line (1868), the telephone network (1888) and the Sonnenfeld printing works.

In 1891 the city had 10,115 Jews, 26.2 per cent of the population – the highest share the Encyclopaedia Judaica records. In 1910 they numbered 15,115 (23.6 per cent). A new Jewish hospital opened in 1905, alongside Jewish schools, charities and two high schools: the Orthodox, founded in 1888, and the Neolog, founded in 1920. Both operated until the Holocaust.

Orthodox and Neolog

A Reform congregation was founded in 1847 and dissolved in 1848. According to Tikvah, a Neolog congregation of about 220 families was formed in 1861 and rejoined the old community in 1865. In 1870 the two finally parted into Orthodox and Neolog communities. A third group, the Status Quo Ante, existed until 1885. The burial society and the hospital remained shared.

The Orthodox were led by Rabbi Aaron Isaac Landsberg (1853–1879), then by Rabbi Moses Zevi Fuchs and his son Benjamin (1915–1936). The Neolog rabbis included Alexander Kohut (1880–1884) and Lipót Kecskeméti (1897–1936). During the First World War Hasidic rebbes of the Vizhnitz and Zhidachov dynasties found refuge in the city, and Hasidic prayer houses opened alongside the great synagogues.

Between the wars: a Romanian city, a Hungarian culture

In 1920 Oradea passed to Romania. In 1930 it had 20,587 Jews (21 per cent). The city’s Jews went on speaking and writing Hungarian, and from 1929 to 1940 the religious Zionist weekly Népünk appeared here. Jewish architects, among them Marcell Komor and Dezső Jakab, designers of the Black Eagle Palace (1908), shaped the city’s Secession style.

In 1927 Romanian nationalist student leaders organised riots in the city; according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica several Jews were killed and synagogues were desecrated. In August 1940, under the Second Vienna Award, the city was transferred to Hungary. In 1941 the community numbered 21,337 (22.9 per cent). From 1942 Jewish men were conscripted into forced-labour battalions.

1944: the ghetto and the deportations

Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944. On 3 May the ghettoisation of Northern Transylvania’s Jews began. According to the Wiesel Commission report, Oradea had two ghettos. The city ghetto, around the Great Orthodox Synagogue and the Great Market, held about 27,000 of the city’s Jews. A separate ghetto at the Mezey lumber yards held close to 8,000 Jews from the county’s villages. The city’s Jews, about 30 per cent of its population, were crammed into an area meant for one-fifteenth of its inhabitants, fourteen or fifteen to a room. The Jewish Council was headed by Sándor Leitner, leader of the Orthodox community.

The deportations began on 23 May with the clearing of the lumber yards; the first train from the city itself left on 28 May. According to the report’s appendix, nine trains carrying some 27,200 people left Oradea. The last left on 27 June. According to the historian Attila Gidó, the property of the deported was afterwards gathered in the Orthodox synagogue, which became a warehouse, and the city counted 4,700 empty flats.

Among the deported was Éva Heyman, aged 13, who kept a diary from her birthday, 13 February 1944, until 30 May. She was murdered in Auschwitz on 17 October 1944. Yad Vashem published the diary in 1974. Her stepfather, the writer Béla Zsolt, survived with her mother and described the ghetto in his book Nine Suitcases.

After the war, and the city’s people

Oradea was liberated in October 1944. In 1947 about 8,000 Jews lived here, survivors and newcomers from elsewhere. Emigration, mostly to Israel, reduced the community to about 2,000 by 1970 and about 170 by 2002. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, three synagogues and a kosher restaurant were still operating in 1971.

The small community remains active. It cares for the Jewish cemeteries of the city and of Bihor County, and in 2021 it announced plans for a rabbinical seminary. In 2018 the Museum of the History of the Jews of Oradea opened in the Aachvas Rein synagogue at Strada Primăriei 25, with a memorial of a railway track and the names of the victims.

Oradea’s people include the screenwriter and playwright Lajos Bíró (1880–1948), Alexander Korda’s partner in London, and the literary scholar Prof. Reuven Tsur of Tel Aviv University (1932–2021), an Israel Prize laureate. Many of the city’s artists died in the Holocaust, among them the painter Ernő Tibor, founder of an art school in the city, who died in Dachau days before liberation.

Visiting

Start at the Museum of the History of the Jews of Oradea, Strada Primăriei 25. From there walk to the Great Orthodox Synagogue and the deportation memorial at Strada Mihai Viteazu 4, in the area of the 1944 ghetto, and on to the Zion Neolog Synagogue on the riverbank. The Jewish cemeteries – the Orthodox and Neolog sections of the municipal cemetery – are visited by arrangement with the community. The community office is at Strada Mihai Viteazu 4, tel. +40 259 434 843, per the Federation’s website. We found no official, current source for the museum’s opening hours, so arrange ahead.