JS Lecture Series - Zoltán Tibori Szabó - The Destruction of the Jews of Transylvania: A Historical Overview

The Central European University

Jewish Studies Program

cordially invites you to a lecture by

Zoltán Tibori Szabó

Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of BBU

The Destruction of the Jews of Transylvania: A Historical Overview

The study deals with the situation of the Jewish community of Transylvania after the Second Viena Award of August 30, 1940, which gave back the Northern part of the province to Hungary, while its Southern part remained under the authority of Romania. During the following four years the Jewish community of Northern Transylvania faced the fate of the Hungarian Jewry. The first casualties were recorded during the deportations organized by the Hungarian military authorities of Northern Transylvania between October and December 1940, other victims had to face deportation during 1941 and 1942. Between 4,000 and 5,000 of them died during the bloody mass executions of Kamenec-Podolski in August 1941, many others lost their lives in the ghettos of Galicia. Approximately 15,000 men were enrolled to forced labor units, and most of them perished. All other members of the community have been deported in May 1944 to the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Out of the total of nearly 165,000 Jews of Northern Transylvania more than three quarters perished during the Holocaust. The Southern Transylvanian Jews were eventually not subjected to mass deportation to the Nazi death camps. Out of the approximately 40,000 Jews of Southern Transylvania around 2,000 persons died in the Holocaust. A part of them lost their lives in the Romanian forced labor camps; others were deported as communists or as a punishment for converting to Christianity, but not choosing the Romanian Orthodox Church as their new religion. They perished in the death camps of Bessarabia and Transnistria.

Tuesday, November 11 at 6 p.m.
In Faculty Tower – 609

Zoltán Tibori Szabó (b. 1957) Founder (1989) and ever since editor of Szabadság (Freedom), the most important Hungarian language daily newspaper of Transylvania, Romania. Between 1997 and 2010 he served as correspondent of the daily Népszabadság (Budapest) in Romania and the Balkan area. Author of over 4,000 articles, features, commentaries, and interviews. He obtained a senior scientific researcher degree in 2009. He is associate professor of the College of Political, Administrative and Communication Sciences of the Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj (BBU), where he received his PhD in 2007 with a dissertation dealing with the post-Holocaust identity crisis of the Transylvanian Jewry. A recipient of many awards, including Imre Nagy Memorial Plaque, Hungarian Pulitzer Prize, Sándor Schreiber Prize, and Professor Bologna Prize, he authored many studies and books on the Hungarian and Romanian facets of the Holocaust. He contributed with four chapters to The Geographic Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Hungary (2013), and edited together with Professor Randolph L. Braham (USA) its Hungarian version (2007), as well as The Geographic Encyclopedia of the Holocaust in Northern Transylvania (2008). Since 2014 he serves as director of the Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of BBU. 

 A reception will follow