Local heritage book Fogarasch (Juden)

Fogarasch (German), Fagaras (Romanian), Fogaras (Hungarian)

The city of Fogarasch in county Brasov (Romanian: Brasov) located in Transylvania, Romania.

In the 17th century Jews occasionally visited the fortress of Fagaras, the capital of the county, in order to present petitions to the Prince of Transylvania. Of particular interest is the settlement of Jews in the village of Porumbak, 20 km away, known today under the Romanian name, Porumbacul de Sus. From the judicial aspect, the village belonged to the owners of the city of Fogarasch. In 1697 two Sephardic Jews, Avigdor b. Abraham and Naphtali b. Abraham (according to another source Iacob Fincz, Abraham Veider, Abraham Naphtali, and Solomon) took over the first glass producing factory in Transylvania. They signed the lease using Hebrew letters.
Only since the beginning of the 19th century was the establishment of Jews allowed in Fogarasch. The Jewish community in Fogarasch was founded in 1820, and a cemetery was built in 1827. The synagogue was built in 1829, and a primary school in 1840, with 2 teachers. The official census of 1836 listed 27 Jewish householders, of which 8 owned their homes; among them 12 liquor producers, 9 dealers, 2 peddlers, a craftsman, a religious functionary, a teacher and an unemployed person. The Transylvanian administration in response to the pressure from the community ordered that the synagogue be closed in 1836; it was demolished after a three-day period. The first rabbis of the community were Löbl Silberman until 1864 and Josef Cohne from 1864. Aron Dornzweig, one of the teachers in Fagaras, was born in Lemberg, and was one of the first poets living in Transylvania to write in Hebrew (one of his three books of poetry was published in 1873 in Hermannstadt / Sibiu).
The number of Jews increased from 183 persons in 1838 to 276 in 1869-1870; to 485 in 1891; and to 514 in 1910. The number of Jews fell after the First World War from 457 in 1920 (representing 6.7% of the total population) to 390 in 1930 and 267 in the year 1941.
Number of people: 3,581. It should be noted that no umlauts or diacritical marks were recorded. The many different spellings of names have caused much uncertainty, so that some people occur twice and may have to be merged. The work on the data continues. Additions and corrections will gladly be accepted from AKdFF: info@akdff.de

Sources:

Jewish community of Fogarasch
http://search.ancestry.de/search/db.aspx?dbid=5412 (county: Brasov, city: Fagaras, religion: israelian)
Births: 1820-1885, marriages: 1833-1885, deaths: 1843-1885
at the end of the period 1820-1881, can be found the family register (from page 92);
as well as extractions from the civil registers of Fogarasch 1895-1908

Jewish Virtual Library
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0006_0_06235.html

The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, on Fagaras
http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Fagaras

Ladislaus Gyémánt: Ummigration und Integration. Die jüdische Gesellschaft in Siebenbürgen im Zeitalter der Emanzipation (1790-1867) in: Migration nach Ost- und Südosteuropa vom 18. bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts: Ursachen, Formen, Verlauf, Ergebnis. Hrsg. Mathias Beer und Dittmar Dahlmann. Stuttgart 1999. https://books.google.de/books?isbn=3799525041