Remembrance of the deported Jews of Cluj

Comemorarea evreilor deportați din Cluj

Cluj (today: Cluj-Napoca, Hungarian: Kolozsvár, German: Klausenburg) is the second largest city of Romania. It lies in the country’s north-west in the region of Transylvania. The Cluj Neolog Synagogue, which was destroyed in the war and had then been rebuilt, is dedicated to the approximately 18,000 Jews from Cluj and surrounding areas who were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau between May and June 1944.

History

Cluj lies in the historical region of Transylvania in the north-west of Romania. After the First World War, Hungary had to cede Transylvania and part of Banat to Romania. In 1930, Cluj was home to about 13,500 Jews, representing just over one tenth of the town's total population. Many Jews in Cluj considered themselves Hungarians. At the end of the 1930s, Hungary began to increasingly raise claims to the ceded territories. In September 1940, Transylvania was divided under German and Italian arbitration and the northern part was annexed by Hungary. That same month, the Hungarian authorities began persecuting the Jewish population, and step by step Jews were excluded from public life. In July 1941, several hundred Jews without Hungarian citizenship were deported to Kamianets-Podilskyi and murdered by German units.
In March 1944, the German Wehrmacht occupied its ally Hungary, and employees of the »department for Jewish affairs« from the Reich Main Security Office under Adolf Eichmann arrived on site. The SS and Hungarian authorities began registering Jews, expropriating and deporting them. On May 3, 1944, Hungarian authorities assisted by the SS forcibly gathered the Jews of Cluj in a ghetto: about 18,000 Jews from Cluj and vicinity had to live in a brick yard in the north of Cluj. Between May 25 and June 9, 1944, all of the Jews were deported in six transports from the ghetto to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

Cluj, undated, Historical view of the town, Stiftung Denkmal

Cluj-Napoca, 2024, Memorial service in the synagogue commemorating the 80th anniversary of the deportations, Stiftung Denkmal

Victims

In the summer of 1941, following the annexation of Cluj by Hungary in 1940, several hundred Jews without Hungarian citizenship were deported to Kamianets-Podilskyi and murdered there. Jewish men were drafted for forced labour. On May 3, 1944, some 18,000 Jews from Cluj and vicinity were forced into a ghetto in a brick yard, from there they were deported to Auschwitz. About 388 Jews from the ghetto could be rescued by Cionist Rudolf (Rezső) Kasztner, later a politician in Israel, who negotiated their release in controversial talks with Adolf Eichmann. How many of the Jews deported from Cluj perished in Auschwitz is not exactly known.

The Kingdom of Romania was politically unstable in the interwar period and threatened by territorial claims from its neighbours. The country sought an alliance with National Socialist Germany but the Nazi leaders in Berlin chose to support Hungary, Bulgaria and their temporary ally, the Soviet Union over the border issue. Romania had to agree to surrender large parts of its territory to these states during 1940. This led to increased radicalisation within the country. King Karl (1893–1953) granted unrestricted authority to General Ion Antonescu (1882–1946) but then had to abdicate to allow his son Michael (1921–2017) to come to the throne. The right-wing extremist »Garda de Fier« (Iron Guard), which was allied with Antonescu, immediately began to persecute the Jews. In 1941 Romania took part in the German attack on the Soviet Union. Romania organised the deportation of up to 155,000 Jews and 25,000 Roma from Bukovina and Bessarabia to the occupied Ukrainian territory of »Transnistria«. Tens of thousands died as a result of mass murder, imprisonment, forced labour, starvation and illness. Meanwhile, the Jews in northern Transylvania (part of Hungary since 1940) were subject to the anti-semitic legislation in this region. However, the majority were spared any violent persecution until the Wehrmacht invaded in 1944. The SS now began to deport Jews to Auschwitz in cooperation with the Hungarian authorities. The total number of murdered Romanian Jews is thus spread over various territories: 50,000 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina along with 20,000 Jews from central Romania were murdered and around 120,000 Transylvanian Jews died under the Hungarian-German occupation. In August 1944, the Red Army offensive caused Romania to change sides. Michael I stripped Antonescu of his powers and the country came under Soviet control. The dictator was executed in 1946 and the king abdicated the following year. In the initial post-war period memory focused on liberation by the Red Army. A monument to the fallen Soviet soldiers was built in Bucharest. Romania’s alliance with Germany was ignored. Under Nicolae Ceausescu (1918–1989), who ruled the country with his secret service from 1965, the »liberation from the yoke of fascism« was presented as the achievement of Romanian heroes. With the end of the Ceausescu regime in 1989 many Romanians preferred to adopt a contrary approach: the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 was now more frequently viewed as a campaign against Bolshevism. There was growing admiration for Antonescu. In contrast, for some Romanians the king, now living in exile, became increasingly important as a symbol of democracy as he had toppled the dictator and was later expelled by the communists. There was no place for the Holocaust in post-war memory. Most survivors had already left the country by the 1950s. Memory was left to the Jewish communities, which established a small research centre in 1977 and a small museum in Bucharest the following year as well as a number of memorials. In 2004 a committee was set up to research the Holocaust and Romanian crimes. The committee was led by Elie Wiesel (1928–2016), a Romanian-born Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner. A National Institute has continued the research since 2005. In 2009, a central Holocaust memorial was inaugurated in Bucharest that also honours the Roma who had been deported to Transnistria. However, apart from this sign, there is still little remembrance to the more than 12,500 Romanian Roma murdered during the war.

Remembrance

After the Second World War, about 6,500 Jews returned to Cluj. Most of them were originally from other towns. The majority of them emigrated to Israel other countries in the following decades. Today, only a few Jews still live in the city, where Romanians make up the majority and the Hungarian minority accounts for around a fifth of the population.
The Neolog Synagogue, which was severely damaged during the war, was renovated in 1951. The Moorish building, built in 1887, has been under monumental protection since 2004. The synagogue, now called »Memorial Temple to the Deported«, is dedicated to the deported Jews of Cluj. It was renovated again from 2018 onwards.
On the 70th anniversary of the deportations from Northern Transylvania, two further memorials were inaugurated in Cluj-Napoca in 2014. A memorial plaque installed by the Romanian Elie Wiesel Institute on the façade of the train station commemorates the deportations. In the same year, a black granite memorial was unveiled in a small park in the city centre. The plinth bears the inscription in Romanian, Hungarian and English: »In memory of over 18,000 victims of racial hatred, Jewish men, women and children, deported from Cluj and surroundings to Auschwitz in May-June 1944.«
In 2014, the Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies was founded at the local Babeș-Bolyai University. Among other things, it specialises in the history of the Holocaust in Northern Transylvania and is considered one of the most important institutions for Holocaust research in Romania.
Since 2020, there has been a small, privately run Jewish museum in the centre of the city. Using three fictional biographies and multimedia approaches, the museum shows Jewish life in Cluj before, during and after the Holocaust.

Cluj-Napoca, 2024, General view of the synagogue, Stiftung Denkmal

Cluj-Napoca, 2024, Romanian memorial plaque on the synagoge's front, Stiftung Denkmal

Contact

https://www.comevcluj.ro

comevcluj.office@gmail.com

+40 (0) 264 596 600

Synagoge:
Strada Horea 21
400174 Cluj-Napoca

Cluj-Napoca, 2024, Memorial with the names of Holocaust victims in the synagogue, Stiftung Denkmal

Cluj-Napoca, 2024, View of the railway station, Stiftung Denkmal

Cluj-Napoca, 2024, Memorial plaque at the railway station, Stiftung Denkmal

Cluj-Napoca, 2020, Holocaust Memorial, Inaugurated in 2014, Orsolya Nagyi

Cluj-Napoca, 2016, Inscription on the Holocaust Memorial, Iván Rohonyi D.

Cluj-Napoca, 2024, Near the entrance of the museum for Jewish history, Stiftung Denkmal

Cluj-Napoca, 2024, View of the permanent exhibition of the Jewish museum, Stiftung Denkmal

Cluj-Napoca, 2024, Towers of the synagogue, Stiftung Denkmal

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