#mediasch

[life-does-not-forgive-weakness]

Mediaș  radu.holerga

[jewish-transylvania-bukovina]

 Processing and digitization project in Mediaș, Transylvania

The Leo Baeck Institute is working together with local organizations and individuals on a year-long project which will catalogue and preserve the found archives of the Jewish community of Mediaș, a historically German (Saxon) town in southern Transylvania. In addition to the invaluable work of archival preservation, the project’s goals include establishing an organization devoted solely to the sustainable maintenance and restoration of the synagogue, offices, and courtyard spaces and building ties within the local community by way of regular cultural and educational events and opening hours. One of LBI’s archivists is acting as a consultant for the project and our JBAT website will eventually host the digital archival documents (probably available in spring or summer 2015).

This project is just getting off the ground and today we began an initial overall survey of the archives. In addition to documents spanning the 20th century (and a few from the 19th), the former community spaces contained various items of a personal or ritual nature. During the synagogue clean-up several years ago, when the archives were discovered, we also found many tefillin (see photo), prayer shawls, and embroidered tefillin bags. Other ritual items in the offices included a small Chanukkiah and a hand-carved wooden Yad (pointer for reading the Torah) – see photos.  Personal items included a set of post-war diaries written by a young woman from Bukovina who was deported to Transnistria during the war but survived (her family perished), various secular books, photographs, and artwork.  

The Mediaș community was primarily German speaking until WWII and most of the records were kept in German until the late 1930s. Of course, being in Transylvania, Hungarian and Romanian were sometimes used and probably spoken or at least understood by many if not most members. The framed photo of famous Yiddish authors who attended the 1908 Yiddish Conference in Czernowitz (see photo) is somewhat unusual in this context, but may have been brought to Mediaș by native Bukoviners after the war, when many refugees from Bukovina settled in Transylvania or elsewhere in Romania.

For more on the Mediaș archives, see our posts from last year, when we digitized select documents. Posts: Sheet music; Statutes;  War-time registration forms with genealogy data; Death record book and cemetery map; Personal papers; Inside the synagogue; Minutes of board meetings. These documents are not yet on the JBAT website. We will publish them once this year’s processing project is complete and the entire archive can be presented at once.

If you are in the area and interested in participating or helping with this project, please write to the director of the JBAT project (see About page or "Contact us" in the footer for email address). A courtyard/garden clean-up event is being planned for the end of July and we are looking for participants! 

[jewish-transylvania-bukovina]

Sheet Music in the Shul

It was not only official papers and records that were found in the Medias synagogue. There were also quite a number of personal mementos, from novels to dictionaries to drawings to family photographs. Included in such "unofficial" documents was a pile of sheet music, mostly from the interbellic era. The array of music perfectly illustrates multilingual Transylvanian Jewish realities and shows how, despite being far from European centers, the youth at least were following modern trends attentively (not so different than today). 

The sheet music, a selection of which is posted above, includes songs in German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Yiddish, and English (most with translations in 2 or 3 languages)and came from printing houses from Berlin to Budapest to St. Petersburg. The styles range from folk to religious, from tango to schlager.

[jewish-transylvania-bukovina]

Registration Forms with Juicy Genealogical Morsels

We're back in Mediaș this week, wrapping up with some of the archives here and taking in the Mediaș Central European film festival in the evenings. This year's festival features 5 Yiddish films!

As mentioned before, the archives found in the Mediaș synagogue are unique and of great potential value to both historians and genealogists. For example, a large stack of registration forms were found covered in dust and cobwebs on the staircase to the women's balcony (they were moved to a secure location several years ago in the course of the clean-up). These forms look to have been mandated registration forms for Jews who moved or were "evacuated" to Târnăveni / Sankt Martin / Dicsőszentmárton or Dumbrăveni / Elisabethstadt / Erzsébetváros from the surrounding villages during the war. There are many forms for families from Blaj / Blasendorf / Balázsfalva. It is not clear how or why they ended up in Mediaș, especially since none of the forms refer to members of the Mediaș community itself.

In any case, the interesting aspect of these forms is that they provide many details regarding the subject's background, including the names, birth dates, and birth place of parents and all four grandparents. Other information provided is current residence, previous residences, education, occupation, number of children, where they are living, whether one has relatives abroad, and more. 

The birth dates and places for the grandparents provide an impression of Jewish emigration within the region over the 19th and 20th century. And of course this is just the sort of thing that tickles genealogists pink!

This entire collection of papers will be made available online via our website, which will be launched in autumn of 2013.

[jewish-transylvania-bukovina]

What school records reveal ...

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was very good at collecting detailed statistical data (or at least trying to) on topics ranging from infant mortality, causes of death, literacy, or schools. The results were sometimes compiled into books and the original questionnaires were sent to the archives, where they remain to this day.

One such series of files regards the schools in the Saxon administrative districts. There is a large, dusty file for each district (called a Stuhl or "seat") filled with forms filled out by every individual school in the respective seat in the early 1870s. The forms are trilingual and contain a wealth of information including name and type of school, language in which instruction is given, number of students according to religion, mother tongue, age, gender, winter and summer attendance rates, excused versus unexcused absences, how many students had textbooks, literacy rate upon graduation, teacher names and experience, school building condition, whether there is a garden and playground, how many chalkboards, maps, globes, books in the library, and gymnastic equipment the school owns, how it finances its activities - and more! 

The first two documents are for the Israelitische Volksschule in Kronstadt (Brașov), which had a total of 58 students: 48 boys and 10 girls. It records the language of instruction as German and Hungarian (other forms for a different Jewish school recorded “all three languages of the country,” ie German, Hungarian and Romanian - rather progressive for the time). Of the 58 students, 40 record German as their mother tongue and 18 Hungarian. This school had 3 maps, 1 globe, a picture atlas and 125 books in its library.

The last form is from a trade school in Mediaș which had 115 students, 7 of whom were Jewish. Of interest on this form is that it is one of the only examples I have seen in which the Jewish children are recorded as having a mother tongue other than German or Hungarian. Presumably Yiddish was meant (the Jewish children are listed under “other language”), but at that time in the Habsburg Empire Yiddish was counted as German on official forms so this is a rare find. For those wondering when the Jews of southern Transylvania transitioned from Yiddish as a mother tongue to German or Hungarian (as opposed to the Jewish communities in the north many of whom continued to use Yiddish as their primary language until World War II), then this seems to indicate that many were still speaking Yiddish in the home up until the 1870s at least.

[jewish-transylvania-bukovina]

Death record book and cemetery plots map, Mediasch

The archives found in the Mediaș synagogue included a large, heavy book recording deaths in the community and respective burial plots in the cemetery. There is also a map of the cemetery with names carefully penned in. One of the interesting things about these books (and many of the records from the Mediaș community) is that the writing is in German or, when using the Hebrew-script, then it is an exact transcription of the German. In the example above, the scribe for the cemetery map even included an umlaut above the alef (א) for the word Wächter (guard or gate-keeper)!

Good Shabbes!

[jewish-transylvania-bukovina]

Random Individual Archives in Medias

Amongst the record books for the community, prayer books, correspondence related to matza delivery, and other paraphernalia found in the Medias synagogue and community offices, are files for individual community members dating until the late 1980s. If one takes all the documents together, many of them tell stories far beyond the initial petitions to have an elderly member admitted to a Jewish nursing home (generally in Bucharest - one wonders how elderly natives of bucolic and serene Transylvania adjusted to Bucharest's hot climate and frenzied culture).

One such file contains papers referring to Rozalia Lichtenegger nee Fried. Rozalia was born in 1909 in Boian, a village about 18 km (11 miles) from Medias. By the time World War II came around, she was living in Sfantu Gheorghe, probably as a result of marriage. Sf. Gheorghe was, however, in the heavily Hungarian part of Transylvania which was accorded to Hungary in 1940.

In 1944 the Jews in this region of northern Transylvania were deported to Auschwitz and Rozalia was among them. However, she survived (it appears that her husband did not) and following the war, she chose to return to the region of her birth - Medias - rather than her husband's town with the associated memories.

Her behavior was quite common. Records from communities after the war record many survivors from northern Transylvania and Bukovina (where Jewish citizens were deported by the Romanians to Transnistria, where hundreds of thousands perished) resettling in the towns of southern Transylvania. A native-Bukovina diary-keeper, whose father, brother, and fiance had been killed, expressed the typical sentiment: "we could not bear to remain in our hometown knowing that our neighbors had not been entirely innocent in our sufferings."

[jewish-transylvania-bukovina]

Inside the Mediasch Synagogue

The synagogue in Medias has not been used for services since shortly after the fall of Communism. In this region of southern Transylvania, Jews were not deported during the war and in fact, due to the stream of refugees, the community grew during and after the war years. But most people emigrated to Israel, the United States, or elsewhere during the 1950s and '60s so that by the 1990s a very small community remained.

The synagogue was built around the turn of the century and a school building was added during the 1920s. In the women's balcony, access to which had been blocked by a heavy metal cabinet, hundreds of prayer books, archival documents, personal belongings, tefillin, prayer shawls, and other miscellaneous odds and ends were found in the course of a clean-up several years ago.

Plans had been drawn up to restore the building and use it as a multi-ethnic cultural center, but as is so often the case, funds are lacking for such a significant undertaking. Currently it remains closed except for a few days a year when the Medias film festival shows films in the foyer.