I attended the state kindergarten with other children, but I didn’t manage to finish the first primary grade in Beliu because I was kicked out of school.
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Alexandru Kohn
I also remember that he had a son who was studying in Budapest who eventually became a notorious character. His legal predicaments appeared in the press during 1936 and 1937.
The story of Kaufman’s son is unfortunate. The young man had a degree in engineering, and, due to certain circumstances, he became involved with the daughter of Admiral Horthy [10]. The leader’s family was in Budapest when their car broke down in the middle of the city. By chance Kaufman’s son was at the scene. As he was a skilled engineer, he repaired the automobile and thus inadvertently began a romance with Horthy’s daughter. The main impediment was that the boy was Jewish, and he thus couldn’t become part of the state leader’s social circle. I think both out of love and out of the wish to become somebody important, Kaufman’s son changed his name from Kaufman to Kenyeres. That’s how he started to have a new life. Horthy eventually made him a deputy in a rightist nationalist party. In order to deny or further hide his origins, Kaufman’s son started to propose anti-Semitic laws within the Hungarian parliament. The opposition party initiated an investigation and soon discovered that Kenyeres was Jewish and that his father was a rabbi.
I remember that the whole affair caused quite a stir, and some well-dressed people came to Beliu to take the rabbi to Budapest and expose Kenyeres. They managed to fool the rabbi and brought him by car to Budapest. I seem to remember that they went by car to Arad, and from there they took the train. When they arrived to Budapest they were met at the train station by a lot of reporters and journalists, who peppered the rabbi with questions.
Back then, just as it is today, the last word regarding such issues lay with the state leader, who had absolute power. In order to clarify the issue, Horthy brought the rabbi and his son together, face-to-face. When the rabbi came home, he told me with tears in his eyes that he had had to declare that Kenyeres wasn’t his son. I don’t know anymore what happened after that, but I do know that the boy sent a lot of money to his father, both before and after this incident. Before being taken away with us during the evacuation, I remember the rabbi dug some holes in the yard of the synagogue and buried several kilograms of gold. It is very interesting that, on one hand, Kenyeres denied his father, while on the other hand he clearly helped him a lot financially. I must tell you that the rabbi did not survive the war, as he was already quite old at the time.
[Editor’s note: The story of Kenyeres contains some real facts, but it is essentially a legend. In a letter from Istvan Bibo to Gyula Borbandi – Istvan Bibo: Valogatott muvek, III. Magveto, Budapest – one of the notes states that during the 1935 Parliamentary elections a swindler politician called Miklos Kenyeres was nominated as a result of pressure from the local administration in Talpan in Szabolcs-Szatmar County and subsequently elected by fraud. The election court was forced to deprive Kenyeres of his mandate because of various protests against him. Peter Sipos, in “Orsegvaltas szavazocedulakkal”, or “Guard Change by Ballots”, also mentions that Kenyeres claimed to be a Lutheran engineer, though in fact he was neither Lutheran nor an engineer. His original name was Jakab Mozes Kahan, the son of the rabbi of Beliu. It is worth mentioning that Horthy’s daughter Paula would have been alive at this time, as she did not die until 1940.
The story of Kaufman’s son is unfortunate. The young man had a degree in engineering, and, due to certain circumstances, he became involved with the daughter of Admiral Horthy [10]. The leader’s family was in Budapest when their car broke down in the middle of the city. By chance Kaufman’s son was at the scene. As he was a skilled engineer, he repaired the automobile and thus inadvertently began a romance with Horthy’s daughter. The main impediment was that the boy was Jewish, and he thus couldn’t become part of the state leader’s social circle. I think both out of love and out of the wish to become somebody important, Kaufman’s son changed his name from Kaufman to Kenyeres. That’s how he started to have a new life. Horthy eventually made him a deputy in a rightist nationalist party. In order to deny or further hide his origins, Kaufman’s son started to propose anti-Semitic laws within the Hungarian parliament. The opposition party initiated an investigation and soon discovered that Kenyeres was Jewish and that his father was a rabbi.
I remember that the whole affair caused quite a stir, and some well-dressed people came to Beliu to take the rabbi to Budapest and expose Kenyeres. They managed to fool the rabbi and brought him by car to Budapest. I seem to remember that they went by car to Arad, and from there they took the train. When they arrived to Budapest they were met at the train station by a lot of reporters and journalists, who peppered the rabbi with questions.
Back then, just as it is today, the last word regarding such issues lay with the state leader, who had absolute power. In order to clarify the issue, Horthy brought the rabbi and his son together, face-to-face. When the rabbi came home, he told me with tears in his eyes that he had had to declare that Kenyeres wasn’t his son. I don’t know anymore what happened after that, but I do know that the boy sent a lot of money to his father, both before and after this incident. Before being taken away with us during the evacuation, I remember the rabbi dug some holes in the yard of the synagogue and buried several kilograms of gold. It is very interesting that, on one hand, Kenyeres denied his father, while on the other hand he clearly helped him a lot financially. I must tell you that the rabbi did not survive the war, as he was already quite old at the time.
[Editor’s note: The story of Kenyeres contains some real facts, but it is essentially a legend. In a letter from Istvan Bibo to Gyula Borbandi – Istvan Bibo: Valogatott muvek, III. Magveto, Budapest – one of the notes states that during the 1935 Parliamentary elections a swindler politician called Miklos Kenyeres was nominated as a result of pressure from the local administration in Talpan in Szabolcs-Szatmar County and subsequently elected by fraud. The election court was forced to deprive Kenyeres of his mandate because of various protests against him. Peter Sipos, in “Orsegvaltas szavazocedulakkal”, or “Guard Change by Ballots”, also mentions that Kenyeres claimed to be a Lutheran engineer, though in fact he was neither Lutheran nor an engineer. His original name was Jakab Mozes Kahan, the son of the rabbi of Beliu. It is worth mentioning that Horthy’s daughter Paula would have been alive at this time, as she did not die until 1940.
I eventually had my bar mitzvah in Arad.
We also had a local rabbi, and at the age of six I was sent to him in order to learn the alef-beys. At the time of our forced evacuation I was only seven or eight years old, so the rabbi taught me for only a little over the year.
My parents shared in Jewish traditions by supporting the community. In Beliu the Jewish community consisted of thirty families. These families went to the synagogue every week. We also had a local rabbi, and at the age of six I was sent to him in order to learn the alef-beys.
My uncle and his family were well off – wealthier than we were – and I remember being amazed that their cutlery was placed on supports made of silver. In our home the cutlery was placed on the right or on the left, but I had never seen supports like that.
We didn’t observe Seder at all, although I went to Sebis a few times to visit my uncle Schwartz, who was a rabbi, as he always observed it. I was a child, maybe four or five years old, when I experienced my first Seder. My uncle and his family were well off – wealthier than we were – and I remember being amazed that their cutlery was placed on supports made of silver. In our home the cutlery was placed on the right or on the left, but I had never seen supports like that. I also remember that I learned the song ‘Eliahu HaNavi’ from my uncle.
We weren’t religious. We did observe holidays, but that was the extent of our religious fervor.
I remember that for the Sabbath my mother often prepared goose liver, something I liked a lot. The chest and the legs were smoked and preserved over the winter, and the fat and the liver were cooked fresh. Liver was a very delicious and traditional meal. We rarely had fish then, although occasionally we ate stuffed fish.
My parents were Neolog Jews. As such, we observed Neolog customs, not Orthodox ones. We ate pork meat, but not pork fat. Animals were cut in the kosher fashion. When we cut a goose or a chicken, my parents took it to the rabbi, or ‘hakham’.
On holidays a cantor came to assist the rabbi, who didn’t have a good voice. I remember one cantor came and slept in our house. He came on Yom Kippur and was a relative of Schwartz. He, like most Orthodox Jews [8], was much more of a traditionalist, better in music and more attentive to detail in religious matters.
When the Sabbath started my mother always lit the candles – this was something unalterable. On every Friday evening the candles were lit. It was my father and I, however, who went to the synagogue, as neither my brother nor my mother came along. We went to the synagogue on Friday evening and on Sabbath morning.
They did, however, support Israel and purchased a piece of land in Palestine. Zionists had long been wandering around in the village spreading their point of view, and my entire family could see that one certainly couldn’t live under the increasingly virulent and anti-Semitic legionary regime [7]. My father thus realized that a Jewish country was needed. When one particular group of Zionists came to Beliu, they gave him a ‘dunavi’ in exchange for a sum of money. ‘Dunavi’ refers to the measurement of land that was bought in Israel.
They were interested in politics but weren’t members of any party.
The district, a subdivision of the county, consisted of ten or fifteen villages. Thus Beliu had its own court and local police force. There was a glass factory in Beliu, two mills and a sawmill. It was a developed village where Romanians, Catholic Hungarians and Jews all lived side by side. Everybody had their own house and a shop where they carried out their activities. Most of the Jews living in Beliu were merchants. A rare exception was a man called Werner, who collected leather and was a tanner, although there was also a Jewish physician, a Jewish clerk and a Jewish driver.
Market day in Beliu was always on Wednesday. On that day all the villagers from the surrounding area came to purchase industrial materials and textiles. People also sold their agricultural products. It was thus on Wednesdays that my parents sold the most, and the shop was always full. We had three apprentices, as there was a lot of work. Beliu was a district center, which explains why so many people came to the city on market days.
The shop did so well, in part, because of my father’s work ethic. I remember that in those days peasants would go to the fields at four or five in the morning, and they often knocked on our windows early in the morning in case they needed sugar, bread or cigarettes. My father got up and served them – many times even without getting money for it. Merchants were fighting for clients, and my father’s generosity proved to be a useful means of attracting business.
By 1940 they managed to pay back all the debt and buy a house in Arad. At first they had tenants in the house, but later it was nationalized and confiscated by the Antonescu regime [6].
My parents had taken over a bankrupt shop from a Jew and made it prosperous. And indeed, the shop went very well. At the beginning Uncle Schwartz vouched for them and enabled them to get a loan. By 1940 they managed to pay back all the debt and buy a house in Arad.
We also had two servants, neither one of whom was Jewish. One of them worked in the kitchen, and the other helped take care of us.
My childhood home was located at a corner opposite the Catholic church. The house was actually owned by a Romanian citizen who worked in the United States, and we rented it from him. We had three rooms: a kitchen, the shop and a very nice yard with flowers. We didn’t have a vegetable garden or any animals at home, only flowers. Our carpets were hand-made, manufactured by my mother. We heated with wood, as we had tile stoves in the rooms.
While in Beliu my parents opened a mixed and textile shop.
My mother became a housekeeper, as she was busy raising us at the time, and my father worked as a trader.
My father and my mother met each other through mediators. My father was a merchant at the time, and my mother was a cashier in Chisineu Cris. The marriage was arranged because this was the custom among Jews. My parents got married in 1926, and the wedding took place in Sebis at the local synagogue.
From a financial point of view Aunt Gizella was the most comfortably off. My cousins and my father worked as her employees.
Netty got married to Klein, a merchant, and they had a daughter, Maria, who also became a merchant.
Roza married Bela Marton, a trader.
Tibi’s son came to Romania and studied here, also graduating with a degree in dentistry.
He was born around 1926 and became a dentist.
Irina married a man by the name of Roger. They left for the USA and eventually had a son, Tibi.