Under the hum of flickering lights, Teodor Koppelmann sits behind a large, cluttered desk. Smoke billows upward from the glowing end of a thin cigarette held loosely between his lips. He projects a commanding presence. As president of the Jewish Community of Oradea, Romania, he carries with him the burden of ensuring the continued survival of a community nearly erased during the Holocaust. He rubs his fingers across his forehead and sighs as smoke from his cigarette cascades from his nose, and then, drifting upward across his weary eyes, swirls and hangs in the lights above. He adjusts a small Israeli flag on his desk and slicks his hair back, securing it with his kippah. Leaning back in his chair, he whispers in a weary, gruff voice, "Where to begin?" He clears his throat and begins to tell the story of his people, their history and his hope for their survival.

Raised in an affluent Orthodox Jewish family in the small central Romanian town of Tarnaveni, Koppelmann grew up under the strict religious practices of his father, Leo, who, like his son, was also the president of his local Jewish Community. During the Second World War, his father, a physician, was sent by Romanian authorities to work at a leper colony in Transnistria. Koppelmann was born at the culmination of one of the greatest genocides in human history, in which very few Jews from Oradea survived. For those that did, none escaped the aftermath that shaped the course of their collective future.  

The third largest in all of Europe, the Zion Neolog Synagogue rises above the quiet Transylvanian city of Oradea, Romania. It sat empty for decades following the war. The city, which dates back to the 10th Century, is situated along the banks of the Crisul Repede, a river just a few kilometers from the Hungarian border and two hundred and thirty kilometers east of Budapest. For centuries, Oradea was situated in the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Jews, who arrived in the region in the 15th Century, were not allowed to live inside the city until well into the 18th Century.

In 1920 after the end of the First World War, rule over Oradea was transferred along with Transylvania to the Kingdom of Romania as part of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The inhabitants of the city had historically been Hungarian, with most of the Romanian population living in villages nearby. Local Jewry tended to identify socially and linguistically with Hungary. Eleven years before Kristalnacht took place in Germany, Romania began to experience a rise in nationalism that led to its very own Kristalnacht in cities across the country, including Oradea. During the night of terror, Romanian students travelled by train and killed a number of Jews and vandalized synagogues in Oradea. As the region began to feel the negative economic downturn of the Great Depression, ethnic tensions continued to rise.

In the 1930s, Oradea’s Jewish population climbed to approximately thirty thousand, making it one third of the city’s entire population. Scattered across the city were approximately eighteen active synagogues and around eleven prayer houses. The city center was also filled with architectural masterpieces constructed by prominent Jewish architects. Affluent members of Jewish society helped Oradea earn a reputation as a hub for Art Nouveau design in Europe. Local Jews also ushered in innovations in industry, health, transportation and communication to the region. 

By the end of the decade, the world began choosing sides in a war initiated by Germany's invasion and occupation of sovereign nations in Europe. Its propaganda machine opened the door to violent nationalism and antisemitism, which spread into cities and towns across the continent. During the summer of 1940, Hungary annexed Northern Transylvania, a territory it long-viewed as its own. Oradea was now officially Hungarian once again. Local Jews, who had identified more closely with Hungarians, welcomed the change. 

Within months however, Hungary had become a German ally. Senior officials in Budapest appointed a brazenly antisemitic interim mayor over Oradea by the name of László Gyapai. He served from March until October of 1944 and oversaw the methodical destruction of the Jewish way of life throughout the city. Roughly thirty thousand Jews from Oradea and the surrounding villages were crowded into the city’s two ghettos, the larger of them being the second largest ghetto under Hungarian control. Local Jews were targeted in acts of tremendous brutality, many murdered in the streets and tormented by the police. The Jews of Oradea were robbed of whatever remaining possessions they had. Finally, between May and June of 1944, approximately 27,000 Jews were deported by train to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Only a few survived.

Though not in control of Oradea at the time, Romania also played a major role in the Holocaust- a fact seldom acknowledged by Romanians to this day. Under the military dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, Romania allied itself with Hitler’s Germany to avoid further Hungarian annexation of Transylvania and to guard against an anticipated Soviet advance. It also used the opportunity to perpetrate violent crimes against its Jewish population. By the end of the Second World War, Romania and territories under its control carried out the systematic murder of nearly 400,000 Jews, more than twice the total number of Jews murdered inside Germany during the war. In fact, besides Germany and Hungary, no other ethnic group carried out the genocide of as many Jews as did Romania during the war.

As Germany’s tactical failures began to mount and the front drew nearer, Romania sought to avoid any further loss of territory and switched sides, joining the Allies. In doing so, it avoided immediate accountability for its role in the Holocaust. Romania regained the territories annexed by Hungary in 1940- including the city of Oradea. By then, however, the city had already been nearly emptied of its Jewish population.

“I was fifteen when they sent me and my family to Auschwitz Birkenau.” explains Gabriela Bóné (née Hamlet) as she sat on the edge of her bed in her small, ground floor apartment. Prior to the confiscation of Jewish businesses and mass deportations, Bóné’s father owned a mirror factory in Targu Mures, just a few hours east of Oradea. “Every city was the same,” she continued. “The Hungarian Gendarmerie (a special police force charged with the “dejewification” of the country by any means necessary) crammed us into wooden train cars that had barbed wire covering small windows. We traveled without food and with very little water for nearly a week without knowing what fate lay before us. We arrived at Auschwitz having barely slept, only to be inspected by Dr. Mengele himself- and the other SS officers. I remember someone tapping me on my shoulder and whispering to me to lie about my age, to say that I was sixteen. When we arrived, someone else said to me, "You came in through the door, but you’ll leave through the chimney.””

Unbeknownst to Bóné at the time, her life was spared by the anonymous advice to lie about her age. Incoming prisoners who were under sixteen years of age were sent directly to the gas chambers. Nearly every Jew from Oradea that passed through the gates of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp was murdered. During her time at the camp, Bóné was robbed of everything except her spirit. She was amongst an endless sea of humanity that arrived by train and entered Auschwitz with a sense of terror. They were all stripped, shaved, humiliated and abused by the guards. 

As she entered the camp confused and afraid, Gabriela was comforted by her mother as the family made its way into the orchestrated chaos, trying desperately to stay together. Her mother whispered that they were only there to work for the Germans a short while until the war was over, and that life in a work camp would be better than it had become back in Oradea’s ghetto under the cruelty of the Hungarian Gendarmerie who had taken great pleasure in their suffering. Moments later, however, Gabriela would be ripped from her mother, father, and three younger brothers. She never saw them again. It was only after the war that she learned her family had been murdered hours after their arrival. Alone with only her sister, Gabriela endured the death camp for over a year before the two were transferred to a lightbulb factory in Weisswasser, Germany. She attributes this relocation to her survival. The sisters were again transferred with several hundred other women to another factory as the war front drew nearer to German borders. 

Allied troops liberated Bóné, her sister and the women they were with at the factory, ending the nightmare and one of the greatest atrocities in human history. For many Jewish survivors, however, the end of the war only meant the beginning of a new life with neither their families or their communities. Their loss was made worse by the fact they had to return home to the towns and cities across Europe that had sent them away to be murdered and erased from history. Only a small number of Oradea's Jews survived. “I remember soldiers telling me not to go back home after we were liberated,” recalled Bóné, “but to go instead to America or Britain where we could go to school and have a future. But I wanted to go back home and try to find my family.” She was dirty and frail, her head shaved and her clothes tattered. Nonetheless, Gabriela Bóné made the thousand kilometer trip home on foot, along with two thousand other survivors. Many refused to ride in trains again. Others walked in defiance. Some time after her interview, Gabriela Bóné passed away in Oradea. After returning from Auschwitz, she directed the local children’s puppet theater and eventually fought to regain the home that had been stolen from her family during the war.

Life would not be easy for Jewish survivors returning home after the war. After abandoning the Nazis, Romania joined the Allied coalition and successfully secured Transylvania. Shortly after the dictatorship of Marshal Ion Antonescu ended, Romania came under communist rule. Despite mounting evidence and first-hand accounts after the war, Romanian officials refused to acknowledge the atrocities committed under its control, as well as those committed against Jews living in what had been Hungarian-controlled Transylvania.

Seventy years later, under Star-of-David-shaped fluorescent lights inside the meeting hall in Oradea’s JCC, Judit Varadi, 87, plays a game of dominoes with some of the elder members of the quiet community. Varadi also survived Auschwitz. “My brother and mother died in the camps.” She explained. “Altogether, I lost around eighty members of my extended family in the Holocaust. So, when I returned home I was alone. I had to start my life all over.” Varadi survived the horrors of fascism, and was later drawn to the ideals of equality she believed Jews would find in communism. “We were idealists. We were communists. I believed that true equality could exist between people- all people. Whether someone was Hungarian, Jewish, Romanian, Gypsy, or even German, we all had rights as human beings. To me, someone who was oppressed for being a Jew, this ideology of equality I saw for the first time in communism appealed to me. Though, there was no actual realization of this idea.” A few years following her interview, Judit Varadi passed away. She carried the scars of her experiences in Auschwitz throughout her life.                  

Romanian communism of the late 1960s came under the firm grip of Nicolae Ceausescu, who oversaw the construction of massive infrastructure and housing projects across the country. At the same time, the country experienced a systematic removal of artistic and architectural expression. Historical masterpieces were neglected, their intricate details covered by plain facades. With so few Jews remaining to repair them following the Holocaust, synagogues across Romania began to fall into disrepair, many being left to the elements. By the fall of communism in Romania in 1989, most of Oradea’s synagogues had either been torn down or converted into non-religious spaces, like storage buildings or wood shops. However, the concrete infrastructure that was once the shining symbol of communism’s modernity and strength in Romania was not built to last. The crumbling of facades across the city mirrored the collapse of the ideology. It also revealed a world once forgotten. Many of Oradea’s architectural marvels- built by Jewish architects- had miraculously survived.

What little remained of the Jewish community in Oradea began to rebuild itself. Before to the Second World War, Jews in post-war Romanian territory numbered close to a million. After the war, the number was closer to three hundred thousand. Many Jews that had come back to Romania after the war opted to remain in Oradea rather than return to the much smaller communities they knew no longer existed. During the years after the war, Jews were, at least on paper, not allowed to be subjected to antisemitism. Despite such laws, discrimination widely existed. All private business were nationalized in 1949, including any remaining Jewish-owned businesses. With this act, any remaining Jewish influence on Romanian society was limited. Furthermore, many Jewish experts and industry leaders throughout Romania were fired or demoted due to their ethnic and religious differences. 

Continuing economic instability across Romania quickly began to take its toll. Romania still had a sizable Jewish population and the communist regime saw an opportunity to make money by selling Jewish families to Israel, rather than just allowing them to leave the country freely. Jews who did leave were considered traitors to the state. By 1989, there were fewer than thirty thousand Jews in the entire country. And by 2011, a Romanian census reported only 3,271 Jews in the country. As soon as communism ended, many of the remaining Jewish families took advantage of opportunities to leave Romania for the promise of a better life in Israel, Canada, and the United States.

Nationalism dominated the Romanian education system during communism and after its fall. Realities that marred the sense of national pride or that could potentially cause embarrassment in the international community were swept aside. A generation of Romanians had not being taught in public schools that their country played a major role in the Holocaust. The genocide of the Jewish people was, in the eyes of the state, a strictly German problem. Acknowledging the Holocaust of Jews across Transylvania would likewise require an acknowledgment that the region had historically been under Hungarian control, thus this was also largely ignored. However, in 2002, after mounting pressure from the international community and with its hopes of joining NATO on the line, Romania officially condemned antisemitism and recognized the Holocaust, though it did not go so far as to acknowledge the full scale of its role. Only starting in 2023, Romanian public schools were required to teach about the Holocaust in their history curriculum. However, some are not convinced of the quality of the information or consistency of its implementation in schools, pointing to continued dismissals of Romania’s role in the Holocaust by academics.

When asked about the current state of education regarding the Holocaust in Romania, Romanian researcher and recipient of Italy’s Order of the Star Knighthood, Raluca Lazarovici Veres, who holds a PhD in History from Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania, says,“The academic environment is not unified… and the University of Oradea seems to be an unfavorable environment for Holocaust studies. At a recent history conference that I attended in 2023, I presented the case of a deported family (Ileana and Marton Berger) who lost their only child in the Auschwitz camp. When I said that too little is being said and done about the history of the Jews in Oradea, academically and socially, a conference session leader, and university professor, became angry, saying, and I quote, “I think there has been too much talk about all of that!” In my opinion, nothing is more immature and pathetic than for a nation to avoid recognizing its past, trying to find excuses for uncomfortable facts. The Holocaust in Romania existed. The Holocaust in Hungary existed. Only by standing with the victims can we prevent another one.”

Mariana-Emilia Teszler, who was president of the now closed Tikvah Association in Oradea, was once at the forefront of efforts to bring education about the Holocaust and local Jewish history to Oradea’s school systems. In a 2015 interview, Teszler said, “We must learn to treat every human being with respect. If we cannot respect individuals or groups that are different from us, we are destined to repeat the mistakes of previous generations.”

Today, Jewish life in Oradea is quiet. In a city that once boasted over thirty thousand Jews, only a few hundred remain. Out of those, very few attend the weekly religious services. Many are unable to meet in person due to ailment. The long-term future of the community remains uncertain. Sabbath services and Torah readings for daily prayers require ten religious men, and Koppelmann is often forced to scramble to find enough. With an aging population, one illness or death would be catastrophic to Oradea’s only functioning synagogue.

Andrei Seidler, former Director of the Jewish Community Center in Oradea, spoke in 2015 of the growing problem amongst Jewish communities all across Romania. “Tradition dictates that in order for one to be considered Jewish, he must have a Jewish mother. Unfortunately, no one could have imagined six million Jews would be killed in the Holocaust, many of them coming from Hungary and Romania. So, many of the marriages after the war were mixed; meaning, there are not many religious Jews left in the community here in Oradea. It causes major difficulty in preserving our customs and our way of life. Without a solution, I don’t know what our community will look like in twenty years. I only hope it exists.”                                                                

Back in the smoke-filled office on the second floor of the Jewish Community Center in Oradea, Teodor Koppelmann’s days are filled with decisions as he works tirelessly to see to it that Jewish life in Oradea continues as it has for centuries. Few know the weight he carries. The construction of a new facility beside the synagogue is near completion. It will offer a ritual purification bath, known as a mikvah, as well as living space for visiting students and rabbis. Yet, without very many young children and families, the future is far from certain. The Aachavas Rheim Synagogue once served 450 Jews in the city and, after the war, sat abandoned for decades. It was recently converted into a Jewish history museum with a permanent Holocaust memorial, but having a museum in the sanctuary of a once thriving synagogue is a reflection of a broader reality taking place across Romania.

“Without young families and children, there is not a real hope here anymore, just a dream.” Says Rabbi dr. Asher Ehrenfeld regarding the future of Oradea’s Jewish community. Born in Oradea to Holocaust survivors in 1947, Rabbi dr. Ehrenfeld retired in 2015 after serving forty years as a rabbi in both Debrecen, Hungary and in the Israeli Defense Forces. Though he now lives in Jerusalem, he visits Oradea a few times each year to assist in religious services since the community doesn’t have a full-time rabbi. 

Despite the challenges, the community has, in fact, survived the aftermath of a world war that saw two out of three European Jews exterminated. Decades after the liberation of Auschwitz, the small Jewish community in Oradea, Romania continues to exist. As its president, Koppelmann dedicated his life to ensuring a continued Jewish presence in Oradea, a city from which so many Jews perished. Members of Oradea’s Jewish community are determined to endure. “I believe the community definitely has a future,” says Paul Spitzer, of the Oradea JCC. “It's like a branch that has been broken, but somehow the seed has survived." The small Jewish community of Oradea, Romania looks into the unknown with the resolution that they will not only outlast the hatred that once tried to erase their history, but they will overcome it with life.

*Since the first documentation of this story, most of the survivors, including Gabriela Bóné, Judit Varadi, Alexandru Kepes, Elisabeta Steurr, Ladislau Steuer, Vioara ‘Ibby’ Braun, Zoltan Bohm and Zakaria Salman, have passed away. The Tikvah Association in Oradea has closed its doors. Andrei Seidler, no longer serves as the director of the JCC and Teodor Koppelmann still serves as the President of the Jewish Community in Oradea. As of January 2025, Zoltan Bloom is the last remaining survivor of Auschwitz in Oradea. 

The documentary is dedicated to all of Oradea’s Holocaust survivors, as well as the tens of thousands of Jews from Oradea whose lives were taken during the Holocaust.