Cluj קלוז'

The first Jew in Cluj is recorded in 1481, but for a long time there was no community: in 1780 there were eight families here, and selling them houses was forbidden. After 1848 the bans were lifted and the town grew: 231 Jews in 1857, 7,046 in 1910. A prayer room appeared in 1807, the Great Synagogue in 1850. When Hungarian Jewry divided in 1868, the majority in Cluj remained Orthodox; beside them stood Neologs and a status quo community, each with its own synagogue. Rabbi Moshe Glasner was rabbi of the Orthodox from 1878 to 1922.

Cluj became the Zionist centre of Transylvania: from 1918 the weekly Uj Kelet came out here, and the Jewish deputies of Romania came from here.

In May 1944 some eighteen thousand Jews were gathered into a ghetto at the brickworks; the transports to Auschwitz ran from 25 May to 9 June. Three hundred and eighty eight people were taken to Budapest under the Kasztner agreement, the one still argued over. In 1947 there were six and a half thousand Jews in the city, by the end of the century about three hundred.