In 1944, under Nazi rule, about 18,000 Jews were deported in six trains from the city of Cluj-Napoca in present-day Romania to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. They almost all perished. Jewish houses, offices, archives and synagogues in Cluj were looted and possessions looted, including books and historical accounts, leaving a scarce trace of a once-living, predominantly Hungarian-speaking community.
Today, decades after many of the few Holocaust survivors emigrated, the Jewish community there numbers only 350 and possesses little evidence of its history.
But this month, a rare relic of Cluj’s Jewish past appeared at an auction house in New York. A bound memorial register of Jewish funerals in the city between 1836 and 1899 was one of 17 documents presented and then withdrawn from trade, at Kestenbaum & Company, an auction house in Brooklyn that specializes in Judaica.
The withdrawal comes at the request of the Jewish community in Cluj and the World Jewish Restitution Organization, which requested that the sale of the funeral register in the catalog for the auction on February 18 and known as the Pinkas Klali D’Chevra Kadisha, should takes place. cancelled.
The register, handwritten in Hebrew and Yiddish, with an extensive title page covering the leaders of the funeral association, was noticed online by a genealogical researcher who warned Robert Schwartz, president of the Jewish community of Cluj.
“Very few of the community survived World War II,” Schwartz says. ‘It’s surprising that the book turned up at an auction because no one knew anything about its existence. We have few documents or books, so this manuscript is an important source of information about the community in the 19th century. ”
Schwartz was one of the survivors of the Cluj Holocaust. He was hidden in a basement after his pregnant mother escaped from the city’s ghetto. He is a leading chemist and has been leading the Jewish community of Cluj since 2010, which is the fourth largest city in Romania and home to the country’s largest university.
Under his leadership, the community sought to rebuild, with the celebration of Jewish religious festivals with a larger audience and the performance of scientific events in the pre-pandemic era. The Neolog Synagogue, the only one of the three synagogues there still used as a Jewish place of worship, is currently being renovated and will house a small museum, Schwartz said. “This document can be very valuable as an important exhibit,” he said.
In a letter to the auction house earlier this month, Schwartz described the manuscript – which is estimated to yield between $ 5,000 and $ 7,000 – as “very precious to the history of our community” and said it was “illegally approved by persons who have not yet identified. ”
He also enlisted the support of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, which called on the auction house to stop selling the Cluj funeral records and a similar register of the births and deaths of Jews from nearby Oradea. In its letter, the restitution organization said private institutions such as Kestenbaum had “the responsibility to ensure that claims for recovery of post-confiscated property are resolved quickly” and cited international agreements on the return of Nazi looted cultural property. property and assets from the Holocaust era.
“Given the historically delicate nature of the items entrusted to us to handle, we consider the case to be the title of the utmost importance,” Daniel Kestenbaum, the founding chairman of the auction house, wrote in an email. “As a result, manuscripts regarding recently obtained information were withdrawn from our Judaica auction in February.”
The deliverer is “a scientific businessman who has been working hard for decades to save and preserve historical artifacts that would otherwise be destroyed,” Kestenbaum said. The seller agreed to discuss the matter further with the restitution organization, he said.
Zoltan Tibori Szabo, director of the Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Cluj, said he relied on the goodwill of the sender. If available to researchers, the newly discovered registry will give scholars the names of the ancestors of those deported, he said.
“Usually when someone 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 robbed and disappeared. You cannot compile the history of a community without documents. We do not even have a list of their names. ”
Although historical Jewish community records are sometimes offered for sale, it is unusual for so many to be offered at auction at one time, said Jonathan Fishburn, a dealer in Jewish and Hebrew books in London. The market is usually limited to museums and libraries, although some private collectors with a specific region would also be potential customers, he said. Kestenbaum said that of about 30,000 auction plots he has managed in his career, only about 100 have recorded such records, which he described as crucial to genealogical research.
“It’s about saving history,” said Gideon Taylor, chairman of the World Jewish Restitution Organization. The newly discovered register ‘is a treasure and a rare window into the past’, he said. “Every name on the list is important.”
The discovery of these documents is ‘symbolic of a greater challenge’, he said. ‘How do we ensure that this history is not traded? We want to make sure it gives us a road map ahead. We will reach out to auction houses in a more systematic way and look for partnerships. ‘