Oradea אוראדיה
The largest Jewish community of Transylvania, over twenty thousand, a fifth of the city, with an Orthodox and a Neolog congregation; in the spring of 1944 all of it was taken to Auschwitz.
Jews in Oradea, Nagyvarad in Hungarian, Grosswardein in German, are mentioned in documents of 1407 and 1489, but reliable records begin in the eighteenth century: four Jews in 1722, a burial society in 1731. Then came a growth no town of the region knew: 1,600 people in 1840, 10,115 in 1891, 15,115 in 1910, 20,587 in 1930 and 21,337 in 1941, more than a fifth of the inhabitants.
After the Hungarian congress of 1868 the community divided: in 1870 the Orthodox and the Neologs stood apart. The Neologs had a temple with an organ in 1878, the Orthodox their own great synagogue in 1891. The rabbis of the Orthodox were Rabbi Aharon Yitzchak Landsberg (1853-1879) and Rabbi Moshe Tzvi Fuchs; the Neologs were served by Alexander Kohut (1880-1884), the same man who later published the Arukh HaShalem.
After the Germans came in March 1944 the Jews of Oradea were driven into a ghetto and taken to Auschwitz. In 1947 there were eight thousand Jews in the city, in 1971 two thousand; the rest had left.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- Population censuses: 1840, 1891, 1910, 1930 and 1941 — the size of the community by year
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the years, the numbers and the circumstances
Basis: documents and evidence.