The Jews of Reșița: A Synagogue in the Steel Town

Reșița, the steel town of the mountainous Banat, grew up around its ironworks, and its Jews — workers, clerks, engineers and merchants — built a Neolog synagogue whose metal frame was made at the works. The building still stands and was repaired after 2020, and a small community remains registered in the town with the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania.

A community in a factory town

According to the documentation project Poveștile Sinagogilor (Stories of the Synagogues), written by the architect Gabriel Szekély, Reșița first had a small Sephardi community; many Ashkenazi Jews arrived later, and the Sephardim were absorbed into them. Many members worked at the plant — most as labourers, alongside clerks, engineers, intellectuals and merchants. The JewishGen cemetery survey gives the census figures: 93 Jews in 1880, 244 in 1900 and 300 in 1930.

Reșița has an entry in Pinkas HaKehillot Romania, in the section on southern Transylvania (p. 344), but we found no accessible translation. The details here therefore rest mainly on the documentation of the synagogue, the Federation’s lists and testimonies collected in the Banat.

The synagogue: Neolog from the start

According to Poveștile Sinagogilor, the plot was bought in 1869 from the railway company of the day; the building was designed in 1878, completed in 1880 and rededicated in 1907 — perhaps, the source says, after repairs or for the visit of an important figure, though this is uncertain. The Federation’s list of synagogues gives only the year 1907, so the construction date is not clear-cut.

The building was designed from the outset for Neolog worship: the bimah stands at the front, before the Ark, rather than in the middle of the hall as in Orthodox synagogues. It had an organ, removed in later repairs. The neo-Romanesque façade alternates exposed brick with bands of plaster, flat pilasters, a central rose window and round-arched windows, and a central dome rises above the pitched roof. Inside are an octagonal drum under the dome, women’s galleries on square columns, coloured glass in the upper windows, decorated wooden benches and a simple chandelier.

The link to the plant shows in the building itself. According to the source, the works produced the sophisticated metal elements that form the structure, a rarity at the time. The synagogue was warmed by electric underfloor heating fed from the plant’s power station, which worked for decades after the war, until the small community could no longer pay the bills.

Sigismund Horvat, born in 1921 and a former president of the community, described in his testimony a large, handsome synagogue with more than 200 seats: men below and women above, as is the custom.

The war years

According to Poveștile Sinagogilor, the Legion and a local fascist party were active in the town in the late 1930s, and the atmosphere around the community grew oppressive. In 1940 the state confiscated the synagogue building and the Jews were moved to nearby Oravița. The building was returned to the community in 1947.

The Romanian Banat remained under Romanian rule throughout the war. A study published by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania describes the forced-labour regime the authorities imposed on the Jews of the Old Kingdom in 1941; we found no specific account of forced labour by the Jews of Reșița. On 11 September 1942 the Government Commissar for the Jewish Question proposed to the prime minister the evacuation of all the Jews of the Banat and the western frontier areas, with exempted groups, for deportation “to Poland”; the document was published by the historian Jean Ancel. According to the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, in the autumn of 1942 Antonescu decided to postpone indefinitely the deportation of Romania’s Jews to Poland, and the plan was never carried out. The mass deportations of 1944 to Auschwitz took place in Hungarian-ruled Northern Transylvania, not in the Banat.

After the war: a shrinking community

According to Poveștile Sinagogilor, almost 500 Jews lived in Reșița after the war, but emigration after 1945 sharply reduced the community. When the Jews came back from Oravița they could gather only on Saturday mornings, mostly the elderly, because school and work were compulsory. The building was repaired in the 1970s.

Horvat’s testimony was collected for the book Memoria salvată: Evreii din Banat, ieri și azi (The Rescued Memory: The Jews of the Banat, Yesterday and Today), edited by Smaranda Vultur and published in 2002. He said he had led the community for 11 years, after his predecessor, Dr. Ebstein Moise, emigrated to Israel. By his account the community then had about 112 members, about 70 of them Jews, and nearly all except two families lived in mixed marriages. One of his testimonies mentions a choir named Hazamir in which non-Jews also sang.

The cemetery

According to a JewishGen survey of 2000, Reșița’s Jewish cemetery is part of a municipal cemetery on a hillside. It was established at the end of the 19th century, and its oldest known gravestone dates from 1897. It measures about 150 by 70 metres, with 100–500 visible stones, a quarter to a half of them toppled or broken, and an empty pre-burial house. Inscriptions are in Hebrew, German, Hungarian and Romanian, and the land belongs to the community.

The survey records the cemetery as “never vandalised”, but Horvat said in his testimony that it had been desecrated three times, when children overturned and broke stones. He himself strengthened the fence and repaired the stones with community funds, and also worked on the cemeteries of Bocșa, Mehadia and Oravița.

The community today

The Reșița community is listed as an independent community in the contact list of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, at Strada Mihai Viteazu 8, with Ivi Dan Schnabel as president. Poveștile Sinagogilor (2022) counts 68 members and includes an interview with the community’s president, named there as Ivan Schnabel. After 2020 the roof and exterior façades were repaired with public funds for historic monuments, and the project’s website offers a virtual tour of the building.

The Federation’s list of synagogues marks working synagogues in bold, and the Reșița synagogue is not in bold; the list carries no date. We found no current source on regular services in the building.

Visiting

• The synagogue: Strada Mihai Viteazu 8, according to the Federation’s list of synagogues, in a central part of town. No opening hours are published; arrange in advance with the Reșița community or the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania.
• The cemetery: part of the municipal cemetery, walled with a gate, according to the JewishGen survey. Best arranged with the community.
• Virtual tour: on the Poveștile Sinagogilor website, useful for preparing a visit.
• Nearby: Caransebeș; Lugoj and its Neolog synagogue; Timișoara.