Tag #135717 - Interview #78511 (Vasile Grunea)

Marton Gruber was a year younger than my father. He was a baker. He was a lower officer in World War I and it was told in the family that he was responsible for protecting the hall where the first Zionist, that is, Jewish national, meeting took place in 1918 in Kolozsvar. They rented the hall of the Urania Movie Theater – it was at the beginning of Horea Road [in the center of town] – for the meeting. The meeting caused a stir, Uj Kelet, one of the most serious Zionist national newspapers published in Hungarian in Romania, was founded after this meeting; at first it was a weekly but later it became a daily. It had correspondents in bigger towns, and it even had permanent correspondents in Bucharest. Zionism led to the creation of the newspaper Uj Kelet and Uj Kelet created Zionism in Transylvania.