Komor & Dezsö

The most pleasant discovery of Târgu Mures is what I dare to call the Magyar version of the Palau de la Música Catalana (1908): it is the Palace of Culture (Palatul Culturii, Kultúrpalota), built between 1911 and 1913 - ordered by the mayor Bernády György (1864-1938), who has marked the history of the city with his entrepreneurship.

The fabulous palace was designed by two of the greatest Hungarian architects of that time: Marcell Komor (1868-1944) and Jakab Dezső (1864-1932), disciples of the so-called Hungarian Gaudí, the renowned architect Ödön Lechner (1845-1914), one of the first representatives of the Szecesszió, which, although clearly linked to Art Nouveau and Jugendstil in vogue throughout Europe, allowed the inclusion of local Hungarian folk elements.

 
Another interesting discovery was that both architects - who also conceived, at the behest of Bernády, the not least fantastic Town Hall of Targu Mures (1907), besides having signed several projects of homes, synagogues and public buildings built in Budapest, Vienna, Oradea, Timisoara, Bratislava, Szeged and Суботица - were born within Hungarian Jewish families. Marcell Komor, son of Rabbi Salamon Kohn (1828-1886), was a victim of the Holocaust.

Târgu Mures

Visiting in November 2010 the Transylvanian city of Târgu Mures (Marosvásárhely, Neumarkt), I could not help admiring its ancient center, which still shows beautiful Art Nouveau elements - in vogue among Hungarian architects of the early 20th century - promoted in the years prior to World War I by its visionary mayor György Bernády.

Part of the important urban transformations that the city suffered, and which were to delete its rural features, is the Great Synagogue, considered by many the most beautiful Jewish temple in Transylvania. Opened in 1900, it was built according to the plans in eclectic style by the Viennese architect Jakob Gärtner (1861-1921). 

In 1944, under the dictatorial regime that ruled Hungary from 1940 until that year in Northern Transylvania, about 7000 Jews from the city - 15% of the population - were concentrated in ghettos and then deported to death in Auschwitz. In all, 150,000 Jews were deported from all over Northern Transylvania. Today, in the current province of Mures, Jews are not more than 200.

In 2003, Romanian local authorities inaugurated, in a central square, a memorial to those victims. The statue, representing an embraced family, was performed by one of the survivors of the tragedy: Martin Izsak.

Jewish families in Arad and Hunedoara

Between 1-5 July 2009, I guided Veronica Singer (US) through Transylvania, the land of her grandparents, searching - and finding! - records and graves related to her familiy (Roth, Grün etc.) at the Jewish Community and at the local branches of the Romanian National Archives in the towns of Arad and Deva. Our journey also included a visit to the Hunyad Castle in the city of Hunedoara, the largest gothic construction of this type in Romania, and to the villages of Bârzava, Petris, Pui and Baru, where Veronica - in the photo, holding a chick at a family house in Pui - was warmly received by local people and was able to grasp the atmosphere in which her ancestrals once lived.

Wirtzbaum

In the period 6th-13th September 2001, we guided Albert Wirtzbaum (US) through several places in Romania, so that he could find information of his ancestrals, who used to live in different shtetls in the area of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and were called Wirtzbaum, Solomon, Blau, Friedman and Fried. The main places of his trip were Bucharest, Sighisoara, Cluj-Napoca (synagogue on the picture) and Oradea. In Transylvania he visited the shtetls Borod, Cornicel, Solduba and Saldabagiu de Munte, and was received as well by the Jewish genealogy specialist Peter Winter. Because of the 9/11 events, he got stuck in Bucharest and we've assisted him in his prolongated stay.