Jewish Bukovina and Transylvania

The Karl Goldmark Philharmonic Orchestra of Interwar Cluj

There have been a lot of surprising discoveries in Cluj - you can read about the artwork and zincographs found in the synagogue attic here. Another unexpected collection of material found in the Neologue synagogue was extensive sheet music belonging to the library of the Karl Goldmark Philharmonic. The Goldmark orchestra, named after a popular 19^th century Hungarian-Jewish composer, existed in Cluj / Kolozsvár from 1934-1942. It was founded by conductor and composer Alexander Boskovich, as a response to Romanian legislation curbing Jewish participation in cultural organizations. Boskovich directed the orchestra from 1934-1938, when he was invited to attend the premiere of his composition “Chansons Populaires Juives” (later renamed “The Golden Chain“) in Tel-Aviv and decided to remain in Palestine. Boskovich went on to become a well-known Israeli composer; the decision to spontaneously remain in Palestine probably saved his life as the vast majority of Cluj Jews, including Boskovich’s parents, were deported in spring 1944 to Auschwitz.

Though an amateur group composed of members from the Jewish community, the orchestra performed at a very high level. Perhaps due to the fact that “in another life” I performed several of the pieces in the library, I have been particularly drawn to the story of the orchestra and its members. Unfortunately there is very little written about the orchestra and, other than the scant facts about Boskovich’s life in Cluj, no information available on its members at all. Probably most of the members perished in the Holocaust though it is also likely that at least a handful of those who were conscripted earlier on in the war for forced labor survived.

One question I consider constantly throughout my work is how archival material can be made relevant for the public today. The discovery of the sheet music of Cluj’s interwar Jewish orchestra presents an excellent opportunity to engage the public with its past : the current Cluj philharmonic could perform one or more “Goldmark” concerts, using the original sheet music, in conjunction with an exhibition on the orchestra and its members. A plaque could be erected on Boskovich’s house, surviving family of orchestral members could be invited to Cluj for the performances and exhibition. A website could be created devoted to the orchestra. As a small starting point, I created a playlist of all the pieces found in the library, though a few were not on youtube and indeed one, an arrangement by Boskovich of a piece by Stutschewsky, was probably never recorded.  

Credit and Sources:

Many thanks to Miriam Boskovich for providing the photograph of the Goldmark Orchestra, circa 1937.  

Gidó, Attila. Două Decenii: Evreii din Cluj în perioda interbelică. Cluj-Napoca, 1914.

Hirschberg, Jehoasch. “The Music of Alexander U. Boskovich (1907-1964) as Representation of Ideology of Israeli Music.” In Studia Judaica XIV, 2006.

Diphtheria epidemics and traces of Yiddish: Finding the individual in communal records in Cluj

The blog took a long break while we were in Bucharest, due in no small part to the prohibitions and difficulties related to photographing at archival repositories located on military bases or for the former communist secret police (Securitate). But we were very busy collecting data and the JBAT catalogue will be updated with hundreds of entries describing collections and folders held in Bucharest with material about Transylvania and Bukovina by the end of 2016. In addition, in January the catalogue was updated with entries from our period in Targu Mures and hundreds of older entries underwent edits and corrections. Check back regularly as we continue to add descriptions of material held in Brasov, Mures and Bucharest over 2016.

For the next several months, I’ll be surveying material in Cluj/ Kolozsvár /Klausenburg/קלויזנבורג. I’ve posted about information – beyond genealogy - which can be gleaned from civil records in the past, here and here. Going through the civil records of a region remains my preferred method for getting quickly acquainted with the area – from these records you can gather what towns and villages had relatively significant Jewish populations (only after 1850 did it become easier for Transylvanian Jews to move to towns and the urbanization process was gradual), who the community leaders were, and from the handwriting or language used, inferences can even be made as to the education level of the scribe or the community in general. Here in Cluj, for example, there are records from various villages from about the same period. Some were poorly kept with almost illegible handwriting, some were neatly kept in German with a distinct Yiddish “accent” in the spelling, while others were kept in impeccable German by a meticulous scribe. The village with poorly kept books was isolated; that with entries written in neat, high-German handwriting was from a village that was home to a nobleman; the scribe and/or community leaders from that village may likely have been court Jews and, correspondingly, more educated.

Sifting through archival documents from the past two centuries can be isolating and sometimes tedious, especially when dealing with administrative papers – the passing of laws or regulations affecting Jewish life and so forth. I appreciate my days with the civil record books because they remind me of the individuals caught up in the region’s history; they allow me to catch glimpses of everyday life, both its celebrations as manifested in naming and marriage ceremonies, and its tragedies, recorded for posterity in the deaths books. This week I paused upon seeing pages and pages of deaths due to diphtheria: from May-December in 1876 at least 18 children died in the Dej community; the Feuerstein family lost four children in less than three weeks in August 1876.

I also enjoy finding notes in Yiddish in these books –these slips of paper were often affixed upside down by state archivists. The notes are hardly monumental but they remind one that there was once a different Transylvania, one with even more languages than today, when a scribble in Yiddish in the margin of a book was commonplace and certainly no one could have imagined it would someday draw any notice.

Documents on Transnistria Survivors and Other Missing Persons

The central branch of the National Archives holds thousands of documents related to the Bukovina Jews who survived deportation to Transnistria. The documents cover a vast range of topics: charts of welfare received by individuals from the Joint or other charitable organizations; hundreds of missing persons requests and correspondence; border-control paperwork (from those crossing from northern to southern Bukovina in 1946); requests to be resettled in various towns across the country; the odd photograph and personal correspondence. The documents represent a trove of valuable material, of interest both to descendants of survivors as well as to those seeking to understand daily life for Romanian Holocaust survivors in the immediate post-war period.

World War II Charts and Graphs of Romanian Jewish Population

For the next several months I’ll be reporting from a variety of repositories in Bucharest: the central branch of the National Archives, the Ilfov branch of the National Archives, the CNSAS (Securitate) archives, and the Jewish community archives. Though located in Bucharest, all these repositories hold documents concerning Transylvanian and Bukovina Jewish history and I’ll be doing my best to uncover as many as possible. 

Today, from a collection at the National archives comes a small pamphlet, apparently intended to be part of a larger work (pages are number beginning with 65), created in 1942, breaking down the Jewish population in Romanian by sex, age, and geographic location. Most interesting to me are the charts detailing children from mixed marriages. These charts map the ethnicity of the non-Jewish partner and in doing so reveal how assimilation trends varied by geographic location. In Transylvania it comes as no surprise that the most children were produced from Hungarian-Jewish mixed marriages, though certain counties (Tarnave Mare, a region with a dense Saxon population) and larger cities (Sibiu) record more children from German-Jewish marriages. I was somewhat surprised to see that in the Banat the number of children from German-Jewish marriages was more than twice that of Hungarian-Jewish marriages and more than Romanian-Jewish and Hungarian-Jewish marriages combined.

Palace of Culture and Town Hall in Marosvásárhely 

We are packing our bags and preparing to take leave of Targu Mures - next stop on the archival survey will be Bucharest where I will work with a range of repositories. But before we go, there is one last important post to make, a post I have been waiting these three months for – namely one illuminating the magnificent Palace of Culture and its sister, the Town Hall, indeed the most stunning buildings I have seen in my life (no hyperbole). Both buildings were constructed in the years immediately leading up to World War I by a pair of Jewish Jugendstil architects from Budapest, Komor Marcell and Jakab Dezső. The buildings are incredible, inside and out. The architectural plans can be found in the Targu Mures Town Hall collection at the National Archives. I will let the photographs speak for themselves. 

Administrative Papers from the Jewish Ghetto in Târgu Mureș

One of the many series composing the formidable Târgu Mureș  Town Hall collection is entitled “Various.” Buried in the middle of this series are several hundreds of pages from the late spring and early summer of 1944, when the Jews of Târgu Mureș and the surrounding region were first interned in a ghetto (a brick factory) and shortly thereafter deported to Auschwitz. These folders contain administrative papers on just about every aspect of the ghettoization, confinement, and deportation including lists of those interned, addresses, inventories of all the possessions of those interned (down to number of mustard jars, see photo), receipts for purchase of food for meals in the ghetto (see twitter post from 3 September), and what was served by day (ie. black coffee for breakfast).

Curiously, there is also a folder (marked “confidential”) with no date or any indication whatsoever regarding why or for whom the data was collected. The folder contains charts of Jews, it includes their name, parents’ names, “name at the time of deportation,” birth place, and current residence. The headings are in German and at first glance the archivist and I thought these were additional copies of deportation lists until we realized that all the place names were given in Romanian, indicating that the lists are from the immediate post-war period. Thus, in the late 1940s, at the same time as events were being held supposedly celebrating the cultural diversity of the region (see twitter post from 2 September), someone was still keeping tabs on the Jews.