The Jews of Sighet: The Hasidic Capital of Maramureș

On the eve of the Holocaust Sighet had about 10,000 Jews – close to 40 per cent of its population and, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the highest proportion of any town in Hungary. For two centuries the capital of Maramureș was a centre of rabbis, Hasidim and Hebrew printing, until in a single week in May 1944 it was emptied of its Jews.

Beginnings: A Few Families and the Sabbatians

Sighet (Máramarossziget in Hungarian, Siget in Yiddish) was the seat of Máramaros County in the Kingdom of Hungary. A tradition recorded in the Maramureș memorial book has Jews living here by about 1640, joined by refugees from the 1648–1649 massacres in Poland and Ukraine. The first document to mention Jews dates from 1690, when the county’s residents demanded their expulsion. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that Jews paid taxes from 1728, and in 1746 the town counted ten Jewish families, 39 people.

According to the Archives of Jewish Bukovina and Transylvania at the Leo Baeck Institute, the community grew in the eighteenth century mainly through migration from Poland. The Sabbatian-Frankist movement found followers here, and several of Jacob Frank’s associates came from Sighet. The first rabbi, Tzvi ben Moshe Avraham, arrived around 1759, fought the Frankists and died in 1771. The post then stood empty for some thirty years, until in 1802 Rabbi Yehuda ha-Kohen Heller, author of Kuntres ha-Sefekot, was elected; he served until his death in 1819.

The House of Teitelbaum: Yetev Lev and the Road to Satmar

In 1858 Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Teitelbaum (1808–1883), grandson of the Yismah Moshe, came to Sighet after serving in Stropkov and Újhely. According to the Posen Library, he founded a yeshiva and a Hasidic court in the town, and in 1875 published his Torah commentary Yetev Lev, by which he is known. The Leo Baeck archive notes that this was the first Hasidic yeshiva in Hungary. He was followed by his son Rabbi Hananiah Yom Tov Lipa, the Kedushat Yom Tov (1883–1904), and by his grandson Rabbi Chaim Tzvi, the Atzei Chaim, who died in 1926. The last rabbi of the Orthodox community, Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Teitelbaum, son of the Atzei Chaim, perished in the Holocaust.

The younger son of the Kedushat Yom Tov, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887–1979), was born in Sighet, became rabbi of Carei and Satu Mare (Satmar) after the First World War, and after the Holocaust built the Satmar Hasidic community in New York. A modest court in Maramureș thus became the root of one of the largest Hasidic communities in the world.

The Teitelbaums were not alone. The Leo Baeck archive also lists followers of Kosov and Vizhnitz, who dominated most of the county’s villages, and of Spinka and Kretchnev. In 1883 the rabbi joined the national Orthodox organisation, and in 1887 the community split in two: an Orthodox congregation and a “Sephardi” one – that is, of Hasidim praying in nusach Sefard – which joined the Status Quo stream. From 1906 its rabbi was Dr Shmuel Binyamin Danzig, a Zionist who sat on the town council for some thirty years.

Print, Timber and Zionism

From the 1870s Hebrew presses worked in Sighet, and there were attempts to publish newspapers in Hebrew, Yiddish and Hungarian. Most Jews lived from petty trade and crafts. After 1860, when Jews were allowed to own land and forests, many worked in the timber trade. After the First World War the town passed to Romania, and in 1929 it hosted the first national conference of the Mizrachi in Transylvania.

The community grew fast: 2,325 Jews in 1869, 4,960 (about 30 per cent) in 1891, 7,981 (34 per cent) in 1910 and 10,609 (about 38 per cent) in 1930. The Hungarian census of 1941 counted 10,144 Jews in Sighet, 39 per cent of the population.

1940–1944: Annexation, Ghetto and Deportation

In 1940, after the Second Vienna Award, Sighet returned to Hungarian rule, and Hungary’s anti-Jewish laws immediately curtailed Jewish livelihoods. In the summer of 1941 hundreds of the town’s Jews, classed as “aliens”, were deported to occupied Galicia, and most were murdered at Kamenets-Podolsk at the end of August. From 1942 men of military age were conscripted into forced-labour battalions.

Germany occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944. On 20 April two ghettos were set up in Sighet: a large one holding about 10,000 people and a small one holding about 3,000, many of them from surrounding villages. On 16 May the first train, carrying 3,007 Jews from the small ghetto, left for Auschwitz-Birkenau; trains from the large ghetto followed on 18, 20 and 22 May. According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, nearly 13,000 Jews were deported from Sighet, and most were murdered in the gas chambers on the day they arrived. For the deportations across the county, see our story on the Holocaust in Maramureș.

After the War

Survivors born in the town included Elie Wiesel, the physician Gisella Perl and the Talmudist David Weiss Halivni, who also wrote a memoir of Sighet on the eve of the Holocaust. In 1947 there were about 2,300 Jews in the town, returning survivors and Jews from elsewhere, but most emigrated to Israel or further afield. By 1970 about 250 remained, and by 2000, according to the Leo Baeck archive, only a few dozen. In Israel, natives of the town formed an association that from 1959 published the bulletin Máramarossziget.

In recent years Hasidim have returned to Sighet. In November 2021 a large new synagogue built by the Satmar community of New York, led by Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, was inaugurated in the town. Alongside it stand the Elie Wiesel Memorial House, the Wizhnitz synagogue on Strada Basarabiei, and the old cemetery where the town’s rabbis are buried.

Visiting

Jewish Sighet can be explored on foot: the Elie Wiesel House (Strada Tudor Vladimirescu 1), the Wizhnitz synagogue on Strada Basarabiei, the memorial to the victims at Strada Gheorghe Doja 75 – on the site where, according to the Tarbut Foundation, the great synagogue that was burned once stood – and the Kahana Court at Gheorghe Doja 67, the pre-war “Jewish street”. For the memorial plaque at the railway station, from which the trains left in May 1944, see our Maramureș Holocaust story. The synagogue has no fixed hours. Arrange visits in advance with the Jewish community of Sighet or through the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania.