Under Nazi rule in 1944, some 18,000 Jews were deported on six trains from the city of Cluj-Napoca, in present-day Romania, to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Almost everyone died. Jewish houses, offices, archives and synagogues in Cluj were looted and their belongings were looted, including books and historical records, leaving little trace of a once vibrant, mostly Hungarian-speaking community.
Today, decades after many of the few Holocaust survivors emigrated, the Jewish community there is only 350 and has little evidence of its history.
But this month a rare relic from Cluj’s Jewish past appeared at a New York auction house. A bound memorial record of Jewish burials in the city between 1836 and 1899 was one of 17 documents offered and later withdrawn from sale at Kestenbaum & Company, a Brooklyn auction house specializing in Jewish.
The withdrawal came at the request of the Jewish Community in Cluj and the World Jewish Restitution Organization, which asked that the sale of the funeral record listed in the February 18 auction catalog and known as Pinkas Klali D’Chevra Kadisha, be canceled.
The record, handwritten in Hebrew and Yiddish with a title page designed to exalt funeral society leaders, was located online by a genealogy researcher who alerted Robert Schwartz, president of the Jewish Community of Cluj.
“Few members of the community survived World War II,” says Schwartz. “It is surprising that the book was auctioned, as nobody knew about its existence. We have few documents or books, so this manuscript is a vital source of information about the community in the 19th century ”.
Schwartz was among the survivors of the Cluj Holocaust. He was born hidden in a basement after his pregnant mother escaped the city ghetto. An eminent chemist, he has led the Jewish Community of Cluj since 2010, which is Romania’s fourth largest city and home to the country’s largest university.
Under his leadership, the community tried to rebuild, celebrating Jewish religious festivals with a wider audience and organizing academic events in pre-pandemic times. The Neolog Synagogue, the only one of the three synagogues that is still used as a Jewish place of worship, is undergoing renovations and will house a small museum, Schwartz said. “This document can be very valuable as a keynote,” he said.
In a letter to the auction house earlier this month, Schwartz described the manuscript – which was estimated at $ 5,000 and $ 7,000 – as “very precious to the history of our community” and said it was “illegally appropriated by people who did not. have been identified. “
He also won support from the World Jewish Restitution Organization, which urged the auction house to suspend the sale of Cluj’s funeral records and a similar record of Jewish births and deaths in neighboring Oradea. In its letter, the restitution organization said that private institutions like Kestenbaum have “a responsibility to ensure that claims to recover property confiscated by the Nazis are resolved quickly” and cited international agreements on the return of cultural property stolen by Nazis and Holocaust era.
“Given the historically delicate nature of the items that are entrusted to us to handle, we consider the issue of the title to be extremely important,” wrote Daniel Kestenbaum, founding president of the auction house, by email. “Consequently, regarding the recently acquired information, manuscripts were removed from our Jewish auction in February.”
The dispatcher is “a learned businessman who for decades made a huge effort to rescue and preserve historic artifacts that would otherwise have been destroyed,” said Kestenbaum. The seller agreed to discuss the matter with the refund organization, he said.
Zoltan Tibori Szabo, director of the Institute of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Cluj, said he has the goodwill of the dispatcher. If made available to researchers, the newly discovered record will provide scholars with the names of the ancestors of those who were deported, he said.
“Usually, if a person dies, he is remembered by his community and his family,” he said. “But in the case of hundreds of thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe, there was nothing left of them – even their documents were stolen and disappeared. You cannot reconstruct the history of an undocumented community. We don’t even have a list of their names. “
Although historic Jewish communal records are occasionally offered for sale, it is unusual for so many to be offered at auction at the same time, said Jonathan Fishburn, a Jewish and Hebrew book dealer in London. The market is generally limited to museums and libraries, although some private collectors with a connection to a specific region are also potential customers, he said. Kestenbaum said that of the roughly 30,000 auction lots he managed in his career, only about 100 involved such records, which he described as crucial to genealogical research.
“It’s about saving history,” said Gideon Taylor, president of operations for the World Jewish Restitution Organization. The newly discovered record “is a treasure and a rare window into the past,” he said. “Every name on that list is important.”
The discovery of these documents is “a symbol of a broader challenge,” he said. “How can we ensure that these pieces of history are not traded? We want to be sure that this will give us a roadmap for the future. We will be contacting the auction houses in a more systematic way and looking for partnerships ”.