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.
Interview with Lazar (Moshe Leyzer) Freund, born 1922 in a small town near Satu Mare (the name is garbled in the transcript), recorded in Oradea (Nagyvarad) on 6 June 2012. Kerler opens with the date, the speaker's name and his birthplace, then asks about prewar Jewish life there, schooling in Oradea and the 1944 deportation, the synagogue and community today, holidays in childhood, and his parents and grandparents. The session closes with thanks and the plan to continue the next day.
Kerler states the date and place of the recording and the speaker's name. Freund gives his name and says he was born in 1922 in a small town between Satu Mare and Oradea, whose name is unclear in the transcript. He says about 20,000 people lived there before the deportation, of whom 350 were Jews.
Freund describes Jewish life in his hometown before the war: a rabbi, two shochets, an Orthodox synagogue and a Sephardic (?) prayer house, with daily prayers. He then talks about his schooling in Hungarian private schools until 1940, when the Hungarians came in and he was expelled. He completed eight classes at the Jewish lyceum in Oradea, taught in Romanian and Hungarian, and mentions the deportation and ghetto of May 1944.
Freund talks about cheder in addition to state school, with a melamed named Verber (?) who taught Chumash and some Gemara. He says he now reads Torah in the Oradea synagogue when the rabbi is away, though not as a professional ba'al koreh. He also speaks of Gershon Schwartz, who is about 99, and of the rabbi who is leaving soon.
Freund and Kerler discuss the Oradea community today: the departure of the rabbi, the lack of young people, and the difficulty of forming a minyan. Freund says his health stops him from attending synagogue. They talk about the restoration of the old synagogue, funded by the Jewish federation in Bucharest and by money from abroad. Freund says about 30,000 Jews lived in the city before the deportation.
Asked about childhood holidays, Freund recalls Sabbath afternoon with the rabbi's talk and singing, and Passover. They discuss the four questions, the stealing of the afikoman (?) and Chad Gadya, which he recalls singing and quotes in part. On Hanukkah, children played with dreidels and adults played cards. No Hanukkah gelt was given then.
Kerler asks about Hanukkah foods, then about Purim. Freund says there was nothing special to eat on Hanukkah, and he does not recall a purimshpil beyond children collecting money. He says the megillah was read in the synagogue, and graggers (?) were used at Haman's name. Kerler also asks about a plant seed (burrs?) that children threw into adults' hair on Tisha B'Av, and Freund does not recall the name.
Freund mentions the Vizhnitz rebbe, who was in the area. He returned to Oradea in 1947 after the camps; his parents were taken to Auschwitz. He names Satu Mare with Rabbi Yarevitch (?), a yeshiva in a place about 35 km from Oradea whose name is unclear, and says he studied at home with Rabbi Kraus, who examined him each Sabbath.
Freund names his parents: father Bruch Bendersh, a tailor from Maramureș (Sighet), and mother Perl, daughter of Yaakov Cohen, from a place near Satu Mare. Kerler asks why the father was called Bendersh and why the family name was Freund. The name came from the grandfather, whose first name and details Freund cannot recall. He mentions the grandfather Shmuel Tsvi (?) and the family's Sephardic synagogue. There were two brothers, and a goat and fish (gefilte fish) in the household; the mother was a housewife.
Freund says he was at school until age twenty and had many Jewish friends there, and no non-Jews in his town spoke Yiddish. He sees nothing special to commemorate about Jewish life there. Kerler thanks him and closes, with plans for the next day. Hungarian and Romanian were both spoken, Hungarian more. Freund says he had a child who died.