Cluj-Napoca(Kloyzenburg in the project's index)2013-05-1711 min · 5 stretches · 4 questions about wordsYiddish 98%
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
Camera file from the 2013 expedition in Kloyzenburg (Cluj), one of 23 consecutive files of a long session, with an elderly local man. He tells of a visiting rabbi whose voice made him laugh in the small synagogue, then answers Kerler's questions about Sabbath bread and cholent, Jewish-Christian relations and the mixed cemetery. The last part concerns his wartime service with the Romanian army in Transnistria.
Stretches
00:00–01:42
The man tells of a rabbi from a place the transcript renders as Pitshepalka (?) who came to the small synagogue and had a comical voice. The man was placed at the lectern, started laughing and lost his beard. Kerler recalls the same man, who died after an operation.
Kerler asks what bread was baked for the Sabbath, and the man names a braided loaf. He explains that poor people got bread from the communal baker and that cholent pots were kept in a large oven and fetched on Saturday. He also describes the Sabbath goy who lit fires and lamps.
The man says that in Kloyzenburg, after the war, Jews and Christians lived on good terms and assimilated, with mixed marriages. He describes the newer mixed cemetery on a hill, set up with permission from a federation in Bucharest (?) for couples of whom one spouse is Jewish. Kerler asks for other words for a cemetery and for a gentile one, and the man gives a Hebrew-component expression and a Slavic-type word.
Kerler asks about his time in Transnistria, which the man puts at two or possibly four years under Hitler's regime. He says he met no other Jews there. He recalls carrying ammunition from the front toward Odessa with two horses and a cart, and mentions Russian rail gauge and other details that are unclear.