Orthodox Cemetery

Satu Mare Orthodox Cemetery

Once choked with weeds, the Orthodox Cemetery now appears in better condition, despite toppled and broken headstones with no money available for restoration. Recent photographs show vegetation cut back and rubbish cleared away. Pilgrims still make the trek to see the tombs of long-dead rabbis, and the cemetery’s caretaker, who apprenticed as a tombstone maker at age 16, does the best he can with limited resources.[1,2]

With just a handful of Jews left in Satu Mare (Szatmar in Hungarian), this cemetery is just one of about 129 that the city’s Jewish community is responsibile for maintaining. Since 1945, 90% of Romanian Holocaust survivors and their descendants have emigrated, leaving behind their cemeteries but no Jews to care for the graves. Other cities take on that obligation, outstripping their meager budgets, which is the situation in Satu Mare. About 3,000 people are buried in the Orthodox Cemetery, often referred to as simply the Jewish Cemetery.

A masonry wall with windows cut into it surrounds the sprawling Orthodox Cemetery. The openings allow Cohens to look in from the outside.[1,2] In Jewish law, all males of the priestly caste (Cohens) become defiled by proximity to a dead body, and therefore, must not enter cemeteries unless it is for the burial of a close relative.

At the cemetery, a memorial built in 1949 in the form of a chapel lists the names of thousands of Holocaust victims and the concentration camps where they perished.

Many Romanian Jewish cemeteries are particularly significant for the high level of elaborate stone carving of gravestones, but those in the cemeteries of the Satu Mare region generally are less ornate.[3] The oldest tombstones in the Orthodox Cemetery date from the first half of the 19th century. One of the grandest graves belongs to the first wife of Joel Teitelbaum, the late Satmar Rebbe[2] who founded the Hasidic sect that bears the city’s name. Tombstones throughout still show bullet holes and other damage from World War II combat.[1]

All Jewish cemeteries in Romania fall under the auspices of The Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania (FedRom), which tries to rein in and control unauthorized interventions at the cemeteries.[3] Its budget also is stretched and does not have enough funding to restore the many hundreds of cemeteries in the country.

Prepared by Anne Armel, December 2019

Sources

2. Ruth Ellen Gruber, Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2007), 272.

3. Ron Csillag, “Holocaust Continues to Resonate in Home of Satmar Dynasty,” Canadian Jewish News, September 2, 2015, https://www.cjnews.com/news/international/holocaust-continues-resonate-home-satmar-dynasty

4. Samuel D. Gruber, “Historic Jewish Sites in Romania,” (United States Commission of the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, 2010), https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1017&context=rel

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