Once, the biggest and flourishing jew community from Eastern Carpathians, numbering about 45000 people, the Maramures Jews are now diseapearing, slowly.
During the Holocaust, in the WWII, the Hortyist Army toke them over, and 39 000 jews finished in the Auschwitz and Birkenau dead camps.
After the war, just 4000 hebrews came back in Maramures (another 2000 emigrated in America, England or Argentina). During the 50s and 60s, most of them left Romania, emigrating to the Holy Land.
Today, in Maramures live just 250 jews, all of them in the Sighetu Marmatiei town and in Baia Mare In the villages are still standing just the cemeteries, over 40 graveyards, and two or three synagogues, transformed today in romanian houses...
In Sighet, stands the only one lively synagogue (the other one exist in Baia Mare-county town), built in 1902. The Sighet cemetery, the biggest in northern Transylvania, hosts thousands of graves, and the sinistre "Soap Monument", which contain inside two boxes with "jewsoap", made at Auschwitz by human fat...On the other road stands the Holocaust Monument.
In the Sighet Village Museum stands an old rural jew house, and in the town, "The Elie Wiesel House Museum", which displays objects and books which beholds to the Nobel Prize winner, the Sighet born Elie Wiesel, the biggest Maramures personality.
The Sighet jews speak today romanian, hebrew and hungarian. They works in different jobs, such offices, schools or small bussinesses. One of them is pharmacyist, other one book seller, two of them are music theachers, and so on.
In the today time romanian villages, the elderlies remember very well the days when they played together, as kids, with their jews mates, who today has gone...
During the summers, the jews born in Maramures, or their children, comes to the graveyards where their ancestors sleep.
That is the picture of the present day little Maramures jew community.
Probably in the next 20 years it will dissapear at all.
And then, just the graves will tell the story of the Hassidic jews, which gave the Teitelbaum rabbinic family. The time is going…
