Vishova ווישעווא
A town in Maramureș, a third Jewish, with a court of the house of Vizhnitz; the ghetto of 1944 gathered here the Jews of the whole district.
Upper Vișeu—Vișeu de Sus in Romanian, Felsővisó in Hungarian, Vishova in Yiddish—is a timber town in Maramureș, by the passes into Bukovina. The community was organised in 1877, the burial society in 1895, and in 1896 a Hebrew press was set up here; a periodical, "Degel HaTorah," was published too. By the census of 1930 there were 3,734 Jews here—a third of the inhabitants.
The court of Vishova is a branch of Vizhnitz: Rabbi Menachem Mendel Hager, son of the Ahavat Yisrael of Vizhnitz, head of the court of Vishova from 1925, set up here the yeshiva Beit Yisrael of four hundred students and was rebbe from 1936; the town became one of the hasidic centres of Maramureș beside Sighet.
In the spring of 1944 the Hungarian authorities set up a ghetto in Vishova, through which the Jews of the surrounding villages passed, and took them all to Auschwitz. About seven hundred returned after the war; by 1971 the community had ceased to exist.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- The censuses of 1930 and 1941, Transylvania — the number of Jews and their share of the population
Scholarship
- The standard reference works and encyclopedias — the years, the numbers and the circumstances
Basis: documents and evidence.