Sighet סיגעט
The capital of Maramureș and the court of the Teitelbaums; in 1941 Jews were nearly two fifths of the town, more than anywhere in Hungary, and in the summer of 1944 twelve thousand were taken from the ghetto.
Jews have lived in Sighet since the seventeenth century and paid tax from 1728; in 1746 there were ten families, thirty nine people. Then came a growth no town in Hungary knew: in 1941, 10,144 Jews, thirty nine percent of the inhabitants.
The town was led by the Teitelbaums: Rabbi Chananya Yom Tov Lipa, the Kedushat Yom Tov, was rabbi from 1883 to 1904, and the last rabbi of the Orthodox community was Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda, who perished in the Holocaust. The court of Sighet stands in this reference with its own chain. The town had yeshivot, Jewish schools, Zionist circles, Hebrew presses and the Israel Weiss library.
After Hungary took northern Transylvania in 1940 the restrictions came one after another, and in the summer of 1944 the Jews were gathered into a ghetto from which twelve thousand were taken to the death camps. Among them was the family of the fifteen year old Elie Wiesel. In 1947 survivors and newcomers made up a new community of two thousand three hundred; by 1970 about two hundred and fifty remained.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- Population censuses: 1746 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.