Oradea(Nagyvarad in the project's index)2012-06-077 min · 3 stretchesYiddish 93% Hungarian 7%
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.
Summary
Short camera-track file from the synagogue in Nagyvarad (7 June 2012); the index names the interviewee only as "Arie". It is a loose conversation in Yiddish between Kerler, an elderly man and a second speaker, with a little Hungarian, Russian and English from others nearby. It touches on his family's Budapest origins, a story about a rebbe and a peasant's song, memories of the war years, the Jews who remain, and ends with good wishes and talk with a community head.
Stretches
00:01–02:50
Kerler asks the man where he was born and about his parents. He says three generations of his family were born in Budapest; the mother's origin is unclear in the transcript. They discuss people who did not know Yiddish and a story about the Kolover rebbe (?) buying a melody from a peasant. Kerler also asks about travel plans to Debrecen and Budapest.
The man recalls the war years, chiefly hunger, and the destruction of the Jewish population of Poland, where about three and a half million Jews lived. The second speaker notes that a few Jews remain here.
Talk is fragmentary: Kerler asks about Dorohoi, near Bershad and a visit around 2007. The second speaker says that many thousands of Jews died. The group exchange good wishes for health. Hungarian and English remarks about the synagogue are heard. At the end Kerler speaks with the head of the community.