Debrecen(Debretsin in the project's index)2013-05-275 min · 3 stretchesYiddish 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
Short camera file (about five minutes) from a session in Debrecen, 27 May 2013, with an elderly man whose name the index does not give. Kerler asks about the Jews who remained after the war, matchmakers, Jewish weddings, and when and why the man moved to Debrecen. The man speaks of his father's household, his brother, and his reasons for coming to the city.
Stretches
00:00–01:37
The man says almost no Jews or household remains are left from the home place after the war. Kerler asks about matchmakers after the war and what kind of person was a matchmaker. The man answers that they were sensible people, often pious, and that matchmaking was paid. He also mentions Jewish newspapers. Kerler asks whether Jewish weddings still took place after the war, and the man says they were rare and by now the rabbi is mixed (?).
Kerler asks when the man came to Debrecen, and he says 1995 (?). Before that he lived in Ravat (?) and worked in Salka (?). He describes his father as a landowner with many fields, his own mikveh and a shochet. Asked about his brother Yosef (name unclear), he says the brother worked at a large firm and in a pig business.
The man explains why he moved to Debrecen. He was the only Jew left in his village and kept kosher by cooking for himself. He had heard that Debrecen had kosher food and a minyan. Now, he says, Yiddish is not spoken there. The minyan is not a kosher one, and some of its members come for money. Kerler also asks whether he considered emigrating to America, Canada or Israel, and he says it is now too late.