It was a quite big house my maternal grandparents lived in, I slept there many times before World War II. Last time I’ve been there it was after the war. It was still standing. It was demolished since then. The house had 3 or 4 rooms. I can clearly remember there was a part in the house where a tent-like construction with shake roof was built in. Its structure included a cylinder with a wooden wheel on it. On the wheel there was a rope tied to two beams which pushed out the two sides the roof. When Sukkot came, we pulled the rope and the roof opened up. If it rained, we closed it back. It was a rarity to have such a house. During the holiday of Sukkot my grandfather used to eat and sleep in that tent because the prescriptions required it.
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Bernat Sauber
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I only remember my maternal grandmother, Miriam, as an 85 years old woman. I can still see her sitting in her armchair. She could hardly speak, but she dictated to the whole family. The old lady was originally from Hungary, I think from Transdanubia, she even had that specific accent.
My maternal grandfather was Mendel Berkovits. He was from Maramarossziget originally. He was a well-situated man, he had a going kosher butchery. But he didn’t work, because he had two Christian assistants. It’s an interesting fact that in every larger Jewish store the owners couldn’t manage by themselves, they hired help or apprentices who usually were Hungarians. In Lapos, next to each kosher slaughter house there was a treyf one, as well. In the ritual butcheries one could only buy kosher meat, respectively the upper part, the forepart of the cattle. We ate the brisket, the ribs, called leiterl in Yiddish. Jews were not allowed to eat the back end, so it was sold in the other butcheries, where the Christians used to buy. Thus Christians got to eat the better part. My grandfather used to buy cattle, took it to the slaughter house, where it was slaughtered by the shochet. The Jews bought from him the forepart, while the Christians the back end. In order to be allowed to sell it, the shochet had to cut out the veins from the forepart. The back part had so many veins it was impossible to release all the blood from them, that’s why Jews were not allowed to eat it. There was a special Jewish man, the controller, the so-called meshgiah in Hebrew. If one sent the Christian servant to buy meat, this was packed in a sheet of paper, roped, sealed with sealing-wax and signed in Hebrew by the meshgiah, to prevent the Christian servant to touch it with a piece of pork or bacon.
He came home and got married. He married my mother in 1919. In Magyarlapos Jews married in and in. My parent didn’t get acquainted through a matchmaker. Usually, only if there were quite many girls in a family and there was nobody to propose to them, or they didn’t meet the expectations, they turned to a matchmaker. When my father got married, he got his marriage portion. At that time the custom was that the wife should come with the dowry, and it wasn’t at all a small sum of money. I don’t know how much was the dowry my father received, but it stared him off, as he opened a grocery store.
He was an observant Jew. He grew up in Budapest, he went there from Magyarlapos at the age of 14. We had some relative there; my father went to him to learn a profession. He worked as apprentice in the grocery store owned by that relative of ours. Later he obtained the assistant qualification, which allowed him to work as sales clerk. I think he worked there as sales clerk for eight years, until he joined the army in World War I. He was a sergeant and fought at Piave, where the Serbs destroyed a dam and flooded the Austro-Hungarian troops.
,
Before WW2
See text in interview
My father was Heinrich Sauber. He probably finished eight grades and he surely went to cheder.
I don't know much about my father's brother, Ignac. He was younger than my father. His wife, auntie Gizi, originally from Kolozsvar, was a piano teacher, an eccentric lady. The relation between my uncle and us was a distant one. I remember that my auntie was so house-proud that we had to take off our shoes before going in, and this wasn't accustomed in our family, at that time this habit didn't exist. We, and people generally, only had rag rugs, I don't know whether there was anyone who had a Persian carpet. They weren't too religious, and they rarely went to the synagogue. My uncle bought a truck and transported wood and board from the hills neighboring Magyarlapos to the nearest railway station, Galgo, 30 kms from Magyarlapos. This is a village between Magyarlapos and Des. After the Holocaust his son Pal Sauber emigrated to America. Their parents died during the Holocaust.
My paternal grandfather was Menyhert Sauber. He was born in 1860 approximately. He was from Szilagysag originally, from a village called Nagysomkut. He had two sons, Ignac and my father Heinrich. Grandfather died in 1944 during the Holocaust. I don't know what my grandfather's occupation was, because when I was born, he has already divorced my grandmother, so I didn't know him. They probably divorced sometime before 1920. First they divorced legally, then a rabbi separated them. I don't remember him, he never visited us, and I didn’t visit him, neither, and my grandmother and him cut any connection with each other. Only the boys kept in touch with their mother. I don't know what caused this drastic separation, this has never been brought up in any discussion. My grandmother, Bella Goldstein, was a descendant of a rich family from Magyarlapos. It was a small landowner family which later went broke. She had a sister in Szaszregen called Ida Frenkel. Grandmother stayed with us in Magyarlapos. My uncle Ignac Sauber lived separately.
Romania
The matzah for the rabbi had to be done as follows: he called together the whole yeshivah, I attended the yeshiva from Lapos for a short period after cheder, all the children, in a large room with long tables. We put the wheat on the table, and we had to pick out the sprouted wheat grains, just like they do with the rice, because those were not adequate. Only men were allowed to prepare the matzah for the rabbi, from kneading to rolling out, women were not allowed to touch it. And the matzah was quite thick. And what did the rabbi do with it? For both Seder nights three matzot are required, and he sent to the wealthier or very observant Jews six pieces of matzah. There were richer, well-situated Jews, say fifty families, and they donated so much money the rabbi could sustain himself for almost a year. They gave out the matzah symbolically, as recompense for the donations.
The religious ones observed very strictly the religion. On Pesach, for example, it wasn't allowed to eat anything raised, that is, containing yeast. The custom back in Lapos was that they bought two trucks of wheat from a landlord, cleaned the mill, floured it and made the matzah from it. Baking matzah for the whole community usually took four weeks. The procedure was that they had the adequate room, and there was the water man, the flour man, the kneader, and there were the rollers, and another who punched the [batter] with a special tool, another one handed it to the stove, one who put it in and took it out from the oven. The water had to be I don't know how meters away from the flour. There were say 30 women, they cut up the batter into 30 pieces on special boards. They kneaded just as much they could roll out, because there shouldn't be left any remains. There was a supervisor who, after they rolled out the batter , took the citling (this is a Hungarian word) [scraper], a piece of iron with a small edge, and cleaned and scraped off the boards, in order to remove any remains, because that would have raised. Preparation was that strict to ensure that the Pesach matzah would comply with the prescriptions.
In the afternoon the rabbi organized a common table for the departing of Saturday, which was a special event. The observant Jews were all there, it was full of bearded Jews, because the very religious Jews all had beards. They used to draw up to the table. They used to prepare fish, but they didn't cook it, only in the form of fish aspic, and usually they put in front of the rabbi a fish aspic of around one and a half kilos. Everyone went to wash their hands, then the rabbi graced the food. There were three or four plates of such aspic, but nobody touched them until the rabbi didn't eat the head of the fish. After he ate the heads of the three fishes, this was the custom, the plates were put in front of the followers and everyone took a piece of it. The rest, everyone ate as they could, some had larger, others smaller bits, another had the tail. This meal, after everyone ate from it, was called in Hebrew shrayim, the rabbi's leftovers. There were other dishes, as well, but this was distinctive feature, and the glass of spirit or wine that followed. The prayer-book includes all the songs with lyrics one has to sing to honor the Saturday. After that the prayer and the departing of Saturday followed. I attended these suppers after I turned 11-12, even before bar mitzvah. We thought this was a matter of course. At least I strongly believed in everything until I turned 15.
The rabbi had a rabbi school, and there always were some 50 young bocherim. The rabbi gave lectures, and then he examined them, and he did that each week and even gave grades. The grades were corresponding to the order number of the Hebrew letters. These bocherim had a canteen, and a boarding house to live. It was quite difficult for them to sustain themselves, because the community had no money to finance it. Instead, the trainees, when summer came and the harvesting season began, they began to wander around these parts of Transylvania: many Jews had threshing-machines. They went out and gathered some two truckloads of wheat and sold it, sent it by train, thus supporting the canteen. There were some wealthier boys among them who paid for their studies. Everyone got a meal ticket, for which they got three quarters of a kg of bread, for breakfast a cup of white coffee, for lunch they got a plate of bean soup, with something or meat soup with a piece of meat, or pasta or semolina. They had a canteen and they used to eat there. Apart from that, they were not eating in the canteen, because it was forbidden to cook. On Saturdays they were assigned to go to one of the families for lunch. We too had one or two trainees over for lunch. It wasn't allowed to eat breakfast, because it was prohibited to eat before the prayer, but at noon they had lunch.
Romania
On Saturday we gathered at the Jewish school or at the rabbi's, and he examined us. Usually we went there at 2pm or 3pm, after lunch. The rabbi's house had a large room that was full of books, from the ground to the ceiling. I wouldn't say it was an office, but a room where he studied the books day in day out, it was more like a study room. I don't even know what was gathered there. He didn't do anything else all day long, just studied the different Torah, Talmud and Kabbala editions and comments, and wrote his own comments, as well. This basically was a library, one wouldn't believe the rabbi had, to say the least, 1,200 Hebrew books. He came on Saturday afternoon and asked each of us one at a time to explain this or that section. If the rabbi had no time to come, some Talmud scientist examined us. There were these erudite Jews who studied in the yeshivah, but they didn't become rabbis, they remained laical, but they had a very extensive knowledge, and they examined us. In these cases we went to the school, the cheder. They examined us one at a time. In Magyarlapos I finished all four years of cheder.
From 6am to 7am I used to got to the cheder, and the first thing we did was praying, and this lasted half an hour. In the next half an hour we learned the weekly pericope. We prayed just like at the synagogue, there was a chazzan and the others followed him. There was no schoolbag at that time, we just tied a wire around the books, we had two books or so, and at 7am we went to the school because teaching began, and lasted until 12am-1pm. In the afternoon we went home, had dinner and then we went again to the cheder and were there until 6-7pm. Children learned then 7-8 hours a day, that was mandatory. And usually every family followed these rules. There were teachers specially trained for it, called melamedim. Of course, the comment of the Talmud wasn't at the level they used to do it in the yeshivah. There weren't small desk like we had in school, we only had a long table. At the head of the table was the melamed, the teacher, and we, the children were sitting in front of him, in line. Each of us had a small booklet. Each year the weekly pericope, the 52 verses of the Torah, was edited in Kolozsvar. This included the Torah, the Targum, that is, the Torah translated into Aramaic, and under it, the Rashi comments. This went on for years. We learned the same thing each year, over and over again. I, for instance, had three editions of the pericope, and they were all identical. I remember they cost 3 lei, and it had the format of a larger copy-book.
I began the regular public school at the age of 6. there were two Christian schools in Magyarlapos, a Catholic and a Reformed one. But they were only admitting children of the respective confessions. The Romanians had no confessional school, they attended the public school. So we had to go to the Romanian school, of course. This was eight years after Transylvania was annexed to Romania [following the Trianon Peace Treaty] [7], and my parents hardly knew several words in Romanian, and it was quite difficult for us in school, as well.
The children begin learning to write and read in Hebrew. As the child advances in age, teaching had several levels. Around the first year they learn the letters, to write and read. They get a general idea about the holidays and their meaning. In the second year they begin the weekly pericope. The Torah is divided in 54 sections, one for each week. In the first week they learn that God created the world, Adam, Eve, what did they do and so on. Then comes Noah and so on, for a whole year, until they learn all of it. The teaching method was that I had to read in Hebrew and to translate it immediately into Yiddish. For example 'Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'arets'. That is: In the beginning God created heaven and earth, and I had to translate it right away. Next it says: 'vyhi mavdil beyn mayim lamayim' divided between water and earth [Editor's note: to be correct, it's divided between water and waters]. So we had to learn this way. Each of these pericopes, these stories, have 10-15 pages, and it went on like this. We didn't learn any comments, we had to learn them literally. In the third or fourth year we began studying the Rashi [6]. The Bible has many comments, included in the biblical reading book: the main commentator is Rashi, on of the most renowned scientists, even more famous than Maimonides, who wrote the comment on the entire Torah. [Editor's note: To be more precise, Rashi wrote a comment on the Mishnah, while Maimonides' comment is on the Mishnah Torah.] But only a few studied it because it was quite difficult. The comment itself was quite abstract and the structure of sentences is quite complex. In the third year we began studying the Talmud. We learned all this in the cheder, in Hebrew.
After I turned 5, I began to attend the cheder, the Jewish school. The Jewish school meant that we only studied Hebrew and religion. Children usually began the cheder at the age of 6 and attended it until 14. Some continued to attend it even after bar mitzvah, those who wanted, could go to yeshivah. Girls, of course, weren't allowed to go to cheder. But there was the melamed, the teacher, and, at home, his wife was teaching the girls to read and write in Hebrew. Some 20-30 girls were going there, at different hours. They were taught 2-3 hours a day. they didn't learn pericope, but the 613 commandments a Jew should know, they had to learn. They learned the prayers, especially the Saturday and the holiday prayers. Women held a great responsibility in observing the prescriptions and in educating the children.
Romania
If you had a problem, the first one you should turn to was the rabbi. Everybody did this. The rabbi settled the litigations, but as far as I remember, there were no such cases in our family. For example, if someone owed me 500,000 lei, we agreed whether to go to court or to the rabbi. If one agreed to go to the rabbi, there was no further discussion. If the rabbi said it's white, it was white, there was no room for appeal, one had to obey the decision. Usually people turned to the rabbi with serious issues, and the rabbi normally had a very loyal attitude towards these problems. The son-in-law of the rabbi from Lapos was called Gross. He was the dayyan. After my mother got the hen slaughtered with the shochet, took it home and cut it up and found some deformation, she had to go to the dayyan. The dayyan examined it and decided whether it can be eaten or not. If he decided it was not good, it had to be thrown away. They were very decent, though: if a poor man went to him and there was something wrong with his hen, the dayyan knew how many children the family had, he told him: 'Cut this out, throw it away and eat the rest.
The rabbi's wife had duties, for example, before marriage, she walked the bride to the mikveh for the ritual bath. There was a mikveh in Magyarlapos, and one could go there on each Friday afternoon. This was something people really enjoyed, since there was no bathroom in the whole village. There were 16 wooden tubs with hot water, one had to bathe there. Next people went to the large pool in which people had to go underwater. You were not allowed to go directly into the pool, except for one occasion during the autumn holidays. On the holidays of fall one had to wake up at 4am on seven days, and had to go to the synagogue to do penance. Long prayers had to be said there, then it was obligatory to go to the mikveh, and people went directly into the pool, without washing themselves, had to dive three times in the water, dry oneself with a towel and got out. Women had their special day when they went to the mikveh. They had to go there each month after their menstruation. There were very severe rules. The man was prohibited by law from accepting even a glass of water from his wife in this period of impurity, to prevent the lust after his wife. This rule was observed in our family, as well.
Romania
There was a famous rabbi dynasty, the Teitelbaums [5], they were originally from Sziget. My rabbi was also a descendant of this dynasty, and had a younger cousin who was in Szatmar around 1933-1934. His name was Jajlis Rebbe. He came to Szatmar from Nagykaroly, and managed to gather so many followers that he became world famous and people came to him even from America or Switzerland. But our rabbi was equally religious, he was too a Hasid rabbi. This rabbi was an older man, I remember that when I was a child he was already 60, and 10-12 years later he died. He was bearded and had a fur cap, like the Polish boyars, called shtraymel, the Polish Hasids used to wear them. He had a black caftan, white stockings and low shoes – in that period low shoes were something exceptional. Back then everyone wore legged shoes. The low shoes were black shoes the country women used to wear, just that theirs was made from rubber, while the rabbi's was leather, of course. His son-in-law was the judge, that is the dayyan. He had two sons, both rabbis, one of them in Hungary, the other one in Czechoslovakia. I don't recall their names.
Romania
I only remember one case when someone convert from Judaism. The Markovitses were a very observant family. They had a small booth where they were selling soda and sweets. His daughter worked in that store. She was a very pretty girl. There was a collector, a very good-looking Romanian man, the head of the public finances, they were about the same age, or the man was slightly older, and they fell in love with each other. One day the girl disappeared. They looked for here everywhere for months, but nobody knew what happened to her. In the end, one of the neighbors told them she is in the house of the collector. Moreover, they have been married by a Romanian priest. The whole family was totally devastated. For a Jew, a convert Jew is the same as a dead one. The whole community was talking only about what happened – she has been excluded from the community. She was disown even from her family and broke any contact with her. For us children this was a very unusual thing for a Jewish girl or boy to marry a Christian, this was equivalent to your death. (And interestingly, she haven't been deported and had 2 children. She died already, she was 6 years older than me.
Romania
Now I will discuss a social issue: there were at least 150 people in Magyarlapos who had no income at all. There was no such thing as a retired, only those got pensions who worked for the gendarmerie or the town-hall and have been retired. If one worked as assistant of a trader, after they weren't able to work anymore, what happened with them? There were no international Jewish world organizations then who could finance them, like today. In the synagogue, at each prayer, in the morning and in the evening, there were two or three religious people walking from one person to the other and collecting in their palms just enough money to ensure the necessary food for those without any income. My father, amongst others, got involved in this action [at the local aid organization], in the sense that he got a list of people who had children: three, four, five or eight, and for each the needed amount of flour, sugar, kerosene, rice or shoe sole, because shoes needed soling or patching. They commissioned a man to distribute these goods. The Jewish community used to organize these actions, they drew up the list, so the community itself supported these people, from the money they collected through the donations at the synagogue. The community paid for the delivered goods. If someone died in such a family, from then on they got less quantities, as required. Nobody knew what the others were getting and where from. These people lived on these goods: they got 3-5 kgs of meat, depending on how many members the family had. Almost 30% of the Jewish population were in need. There were lots of poor people.
Another person was selling rock-flint smuggled in from Czechoslovakia. It wasn't allowed to use a lighter then, because it was match monopoly. [Editor's note: Between the wars it was a characteristic of the Romanian economic policy that due to the lack of some goods (salt, kerosene, match, etc.) the state had monopoly over them.] If one was caught selling them, one was punished. One wasn't allowed even to sell tobacco. Villagers used to dry tobacco leaves and surrender them to the state, but they were careful to hide and then sell some. Cigarettes were relatively expensive, so people used to buy tobacco and cut it up. Cigarette paper was also smuggled in from Czechoslovakia, because in Romania it was no technology suitable to make it. It was just as thin as you see today, and they used to put in it the dried tobacco.
Romania
The saccharin was the subject of another trade, because it wasn't allowed to be sold, because it was much cheaper than sugar and there was a sugar monopoly. There was a Jewish old lady in Lapos who got the saccharin smuggled in from Czechoslovakia, through Sziget. [Maramarossziget is neighboring Transcarpathia that was part of Czechoslovakia between 1920 and 1939.] She used to stand in front of her small store, always dressed in a patched, quite dirty apron, with her hands in her pockets. The dress had two pockets: back then the saccharin pills were packed in paper packages, folded into bags. Sugar was very expensive and people didn't really buy it. In Czechoslovakia sugar was cheaper, and people used to smuggle in from there the sugar exported there Romania. I was already a big boy, around 17, so I also bought saccharin from the old lady. She didn't give just to anybody, but she knew me. Saccharin didn't look like today, it was called ezeredes [thousand sweet], and looked like rice. One put two pieces in half a liter of water, and there was enough to sweeten coffee, white coffee or anything else for a whole week. It was very cheap compared to sugar, and it was very good. Then I went to Sziget: I had some poor shoes on my feet, a pair of poor trousers, a poor jacket, a poor shirt and I took a goose with me. I went to Czechoslovakia, sold the goose and from the money I got I bought myself some clothes and threw away the old ones. Food was so expensive in Czechoslovakia, that from the price of a goose one could dress oneself from head to foot.
Another person was selling rock-flint smuggled in from Czechoslovakia.
Another person was selling rock-flint smuggled in from Czechoslovakia.
5 kms from Lapos there was a mine. Some people used to mine some cellophane-like, totally thermotolerant material. They brought up the pieces from the mine, and those had to be cleaned, and there were some thick pieces that had to be cut into 20 or 50 pieces, in order to attain the half a mm thickness. And they exported them. There were only two of three such places in the country. This material was mainly used as isolation, or for 200 degree boilers or melting furnaces to close the observation-slit, because at that time thermoresistant glass did not exist yet. It was quite remarkable, and one of my cousins had such an activity, and I worked there, as well, because I had no other job.
People were ingenious and look for something they could make money from. There were people who bought up the apple even when it was still on the tree: someone had twenty trees, I worked there, as well, and once, when I got off the ladder, someone just bought two or three truckful of apple. We had to harvest it and to sort them into chests, for export.
We made a club for the youth, which is working now for several months. There will be some computers, Internet, books, a TV set and a VCR, and movies with Jewish theme. But who will come here to watch movies? This is how we want to attract the youth. We have several buildings, rented, and the rent amounts are accounted for in Bucharest, because the Federation in Bucharest, the central management handles these sums, which are then split between the communities, because some of them have no income at all. The members pay the membership fee. The community has 50 cemeteries in the county and once a year, before the holidays of fall, someone inspects each of them in order to establish what repairs are required and whether all the gravestones are in place and haven't been stolen, whether the fences are intact – because our fences are stolen all the time, and these make up the life of the community. Moreover, some of the communities have Christian secretaries and these people are managing the community because there were no Jews around. There are several communities in this situation, especially in Moldova. And this will happen here, as well, because the parents of the current generation were ale atheists, and they don't know any of the prayers. The Christians, regardless of how communists they have been, they all know the Lord's prayer. But these people don't know anything. They don't even come to the synagogue, and is very difficult to convince them to come to the synagogue from time to time. Their children were usually brought up as Christians, so they don't even come this way. This is the situation.
Unfortunately I am in the position – which I never imagined it can happen – to bury people. The Jews have a ritual when dressing up the deceased. They must be washed, their finger-nails have to be cut off, if they grew long, but it is forbidden to shave them. The clothes they have to be dressed with consisted of several parts. No one has kvitli here, and, amongst others, we make kvitlis, as well. The pieces of clothes: 2 stockings, 2 pants, one lounge-jacket and a larger jacket made of linen, over them the kvitli and the tallit. On their hands we put some kind of gloves, and some other things used to tie together the clothes, because there are no buttons on them. Two pieces of shard must be put on the eyelids, and on the mouth a form of a lock must be made out of wicker, in order to prevent them to talk before the judgment. Of course, it's not me who dresses them, because there are people assign to do it, I only have to be there and say the prayers. Then some soil must be put in a bag and placed under the head of the deceased, in place of a pillow. I have to put the tallit on their head. At the end I tell him not to forget their Jewish name, and I tell them their name. Then I conduct the ceremony: I read a prayer and I sing. I told them I will do it as long as I'm able to, but then they will close down the community.
On Yom Kippur I spoke with one of my friends from Des. In Des there were some 3500 Jews, and there was a large community with wealthy people. The president is my friend, he is some 10 years younger than me, and his name is Joska Farkas. As we talked on the phone, he told me: 'Imagine this, on Yom kippur I went to the synagogue and we were only two people. Symbolically we sat there for 2 hours.' He doesn't know how to read in Hebrew, during the communist era he was in quite good positions, he was a manager. I said to him: 'Well, look, sooner or later this will be the situation here in Vasarhely, as well.' The days of the Jewry are numbered.
Currently, on Sukkot, after we finish the prayer in the synagogue, it's mandatory to eat honey in the tent put up in the yard of the community. In that week it is obligatory to eat honey at each meal. The tent was made sometime after the World War II. It is a symbolic tent. The truth is that the tent is decorated by the children and the women, especially by Zsuzsa Kusztos [the senior clerk of the community] and Gyula Kusztos, a men [who is also employed by the community to carry out different tasks]. On Sukkot everybody gets a roll, and on the table there are several small plates with honey. People use to tear a bit of bread and dip it in the honey, and not using a teaspoon. And everyone must drink a glass of wine. They bless the holiday on which we entered by God's command the sukkot that God prescribed. Then everybody eats, and, at the end, we say a little prayer, thanking God for the food, honey and wine he provided us on the holiday. And thus ends the ritual. Nowadays that's how we celebrate the holiday of Sukkot.