The Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives (Milev) has recently uploaded a fascinating new resource — the photographic archives of Lajos Erdélyi, a Holocaust survivor from Transylvania who as a journalist and photographer was a pioneer in the post-Holocaust documentation of Jewish cemeteries in Romania.
Erdélyi died in Budapest in 2020 at the age of 90, and the archive was donated to the museum last year by his family.
The archive includes Erdélyi’s mainly black and white photos of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues (mainly in northern Transylvania and Bukovina) as well as other subjects. The images are taken from his negatives, and various information and metadata is provided for each image.
At the moment, we have found that the archive is a little cumbersome to navigate. Most of the Romanian town names are given only in their Hungarian version, and pictures from each of the various cemeteries are not always all grouped together.
We were told that these issues are being addressed and that some errors had resulted from mislabeling of the original negatives.
Erdélyi was born in 1929 in the Transylvanian city of Târgu Mureș (Hungarian: Marosvásárhely), which had been annexed to Hungary in 1940.
He and his family, like hundreds of thousands of other Hungarian Jews, were deported to Auschwitz in 1944 — his mother and sister were murdered, but he and his father survived and were sent to forced labor camps in Lower Silesia. He was liberated from the Dörnhau camp in 1945.
Erdélyi became a photo journalist, and in the 1970s became interested in photographing Jewish cemeteries. His Hungarian-language book Régi zsidó temetők művészete (The Art of Old Jewish Cemeteries) was published in Bucharest in 1980.
The book was a landmark publication regarding Jewish cemetery documentation. It in, Erdelyi also wrote about Jewish history, about the development of gravestone styles and burial practice, and about the symbolism used in the carvings and epitaphs. The book was republished in the early 1990s in an expanded version, with better print quality and full dual Hungarian and English text, as Az élők háza/House of the Living.
Click here to browse the items in the Milev collection
Click here to see our obituary of Erdélyi as well as an appreciation by Adam Kerpel-Fronius