Teaching Team
Sabbatarians in WWII
Solid news about the war was hard to come by in Szekley villages of old Transylvania where the last of the Sabbatarians lived with their Lutheran, Catholic and Unitarian neighbors. When newspapers could be obtained from neighboring villages, everyone gathered in the streets to hear the news from “the other side of the river.” Women would sew, men would stand about and children would sit with their grandparents while someone read the newspaper aloud.
In 1943 the German army and the SS established a ghetto in Tirga Mures (of modern Romania) in the southwestern part of the city. They built a small associated labor camp, a brick factory in which they forced the Jews to work. Jews not sent to the death camps were forced to work in the brick factory.
When deportations began rumors began to float around the local villages of the Szekely people. Soldiers leaving the army came back with horror stories. Rumors about the camps began to circulate. The surviving Sabbatarians wondered if the Nazis would take them too. Even those who had officially converted to Judaism began to have conversations about trying to establish some documentation proving that they were not actually Jewish.
When the arrests began in the Szekely villages it became clear that the Nazis were not taking only Jews. They took anyone who practiced Judaism, whether an official convert or not. Many Sabbatarians were taken to the ghetto.
A group of Sabbatarians traveled to Budapest to petition the Ministry of Justice. They received paperwork from the ministry which stated that the Sabbatarians were not Jewish, they were Szekely, and they should not be included in the deportations. However, the paper required the Sabbatarians to desist with Jewish practice and join one of the Christian denominations. Thanks to the paperwork, some of the Sabbatarians were released from the ghetto.
As the deportations to Auschwitz began, the local priest of Bözödujfalú, Father Ráduly, began an urgent rescue mission. Forging documents, baptismal certificates and other records, he began rescuing Sabbatarians from the Gestapo at Marosvásárhely. He came to be known as the “priest of the Jews.” In the 1930s he had been a boxer, and even as a priest, he retained the fighting posture. He was known to baptize Jews and Sabbatarians without their consent simply so that he could fill out baptismal certificates in good conscience.
Local anecdote tells of one occasion when he presented papers to the SS guards at the camp petitioning for the release of several Jews and Sabbatarians. The SS guard, with gun in hand, tried to dismiss the priest. Ráduly grabbed the SS officer’s hand and gun and pointed the weapon at his own head saying, “Either shoot me or let these men go!” Due to his boldness and tenacity Father Ráduly was able to save seventy of the Bözödujfalú Sabbatarians and many Jews. Those that were not so fortunate were deported to Auschwitz.
Want to learn more about the Sabbatarian community of Transylvania? Read the full article here. Sabbatarians.
D. Thomas Lancaster
Elul 3, 5767
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Visitor Feedback:
Thanks for the info. on the Shabbasterians. My mother's Checz family went to Aushwitz. Twenty of my family perished there. The only remaining Jewish Checz in my family lives in Israel. She was sent to Aushwitz at age three and is the lone survivor, surviving Dr. Mengele's experiments. This is the first HaShoah article I have read in the blogs. Baruch HaShem.
David Roth
David Roth | August 28, 2007 8:04 PM