Not online: the recording is held by the project and is not on Media Collections Online, YouTube or archive.org. Everything below is a paraphrase of a machine transcript, the weaker of this site's two transcript layers — see how it was made.
Audio-recorder track of an interview with Grunfeld in Kloyzenburg (Cluj) on 5 June 2012, the day Kerler arrived from Nadbania near Mare on the way back to Budapest. After an opening exchange about the arrival, the speaker talks about his native village of Zal (Zalău area, name as heard), its twenty Jewish families, his schooling and career, Ashkenazi and Sephardic and Hasidic Transylvania versus Maramureș, Yiddish today, a joke about a Litvak and a herring, and his grandparents' family background. Kerler questions throughout.
Opening talk about the speaker's poor eyesight and the screen, and about Kerler's arrival in Cluj (Kloyzenburg/Kolozsvár) that day from Nadbania near Mare. The speaker mentions a song about Cluj and the river Szamos, which he sang about eighty years ago, and says he has no voice to sing it now.
The speaker names his native village Zal (Hungarian Mezőzsa(?)) and says he lived there in 1920. About twenty Jewish families lived there, with a cheder, a melamed, a shoykhet, a mikve and a mill whose Jewish owner supplied warm water to the mikve. He says he never visited the cemetery as a child.
Kerler asks about the father, who was David. His business was a shop, and the Jews of the village were shopkeepers, tailors, cobblers and craftsmen; one Jew, Hirsch, traded in wood. The speaker went to cheder until about twelve, with a melamed named Gingold (?) and the shoykhet also teaching a little, then to a technical school in Bucharest (cellulose and paper). From 1945 he worked about forty years in Cluj and retired in 1980. The village had only one synagogue.
Discussion of Hasidim versus ordinary observant Jews: Transylvania was Ashkenazi, Moldavia was different, and Satmar and Maramureș were more Hasidic but the majority were ordinary pious Jews. The speaker says he is a Cluj Jew, not a Hasid. He recalls an uncle who studied at the yeshiva in Satmar with Reb Yoyelish (Teitelbaum, as heard Shteytlban). Near the end he notes that Cluj Jews in America came from villages nearby.
The speaker says almost no one in Cluj speaks Yiddish with him now, other than a woman from Satmar whose Yiddish differs slightly. He recounts being asked by a doctor in the community who he speaks Yiddish with (partly in Hungarian), and says the mother tongue is forgotten. He saw non-Jews speaking Yiddish in the Mare area but not in his own village.
Kerler asks whether people counted Jews by tales (prayer shawls) rather than families: the speaker says that was Moldavian usage. They talk about Litvaks, whom he knows only by hearsay, and he tells a joke about a Litvak and a herring with misunderstanding over what the fish is called. He says he heard it in Zal about eighty-five years ago.
The speaker speaks of his father's father, Asher Rantsel (?), and a family-tree document received from London via his sister's son, showing his ancestry. His paternal grandfather was a men's tailor. His maternal grandfather Avrom Rozenberg was very pious but not Hasidic, with beard and sidelocks. His mother's brother studied in Satmar with Reb Yoyelish.
The speaker explains regional differences: Maramureș, Sighet and Satmar were Hasidic, while the Transylvanian side (Alba Iulia, Mediaș, Târgu Mureș and others) was Ashkenazi. They discuss the seven fortresses (Siebenbürgen, "Seven Castles") and the Hungarian names Kolozsvár and Temesvár, with 'vár' meaning castle.
The speaker's father was born in Iliand (Ilieni(?), as heard Iliande) in the same region, where sixty to a hundred Jews lived with a local rabbi, a good pious Jew who settled disputes as a dayan. People went to the dayan rather than to a tribunal.
The speaker says his mother and grandmother Yente were born in Zal and that his great-grandmother probably was too. The rest is conversation about offering a drink, a daughter (the youngest) and the technical setup of the recording, with some English noise.