Cluj-Napoca(Kloyzenburg in the project's index)2013-05-1711 min · 4 stretches · 1 questions about wordsYiddish 100%
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 (index gives Kloyzenburg, 17 May 2013, no interviewee name). A man from Oradea, who was deported in 1944 and speaks mostly Yiddish, answers Kerler's questions. He talks about learning Yiddish, his father's Hasidic ties, the Jewish quarter near the Neolog synagogue, his deportation, and a postwar bulletin he produced.
Stretches
00:00–01:33
Kerler asks about the interviewee's schooling before the war. He says it was a Jewish (Neolog community) school, but the language of instruction was Romanian and Hungarian, not Yiddish. He learned Yiddish from his parents and from neighbors, and says he did not know the Orthodox and status quo communities well.
He recalls that his father was a Hasid. On Friday nights after the meal his father took him to a rebbe, either the Wizhnitz rebbe or Reb Sheyele (Karestire?), where the Wizhnitz rebbe held a late tish. Kerler and the second speaker try to establish which rebbe Reb Sheyele was. The interviewee names the name Lichtenstein and mentions a synagogue and yeshiva in a district of Oradea.
Asked what he remembers of Jewish life, he says he lived in Oradea until age seventeen and had only Jewish neighbors and friends. He describes the Jewish quarter near the Neolog synagogue, where his father was shames, and the nearby Orthodox synagogue. The community house, where the shoykhet and cantor lived, stood about two hundred meters from his home. His younger relative lives in Oradea now, and he visits and sees the restoration of the sites.
He says he was deported, naming Auschwitz and Buchenwald labor camps, and Kerler mentions 1944. He then describes an association of survivors and others interested in the question, with thirty to forty members of whom only three remain. He produced a bulletin, with a title that sounds like Memento, and made about twenty issues. He shows it, in several languages including Romanian, Hungarian, German and French, and mentions a request from a university library.