The Kallos Family Book 2022

APPENDIX 3 • 63
survived Birkenau, Jaworzno camp and the
same death march that Laci Kallos was on. Etu
and Honi survived Birkenau and Lübberstedt–
Bilohe with their Ruttner and Klein cousins and
the Kallos and Ickovic families.
On the walls above all the memorial plaques
are four biblical quotes in Hebrew that describe
the sorrow caused by the murder of innocents
and the certainty of G-d’s vengeance for these
atrocities.
The second floor of Beit Máramaros contains
a great hall where the annual memorial services
are held.
On the third floor are memorial rooms, offices
and a library. The memorial rooms house a
collection of souvenirs and pictures that depict
Máramaros Jewry.
Photos of the ghettos, deportation and
destruction hang on the staircase walls. Survivors
and their descendants in Israel and the
Diaspora, as well as members of the general
public, can visit this memorial site to mourn,
honour and remember. Alas, today, because
subsequent generations are unaware of this
memorial, it has few visitors.
The venue is now rented to the Breselve Chasidic
group who use it as a yeshiva. Their Rebbe,
Reb Nachman, who died over 100 years ago, is
buried in Uman, Ukraine. Since Reb Nachman’s
death the congregation has never had another
Rebbe.
Breslev welcomes followers from a wide
range of backgrounds, including those who have
been in trouble with the law and drugs. The
yeshiva gives its students an opportunity to sit
and learn Torah in the name of those who perished
and helps them keep out of trouble. Study
takes place in the synagogue and in study rooms
upstairs. About forty-five boys study here, of
whom about twenty-five live on the premises
in the upstairs rooms that are used as dormitories.
The administrator, Doron Stern says there
are bigger plans for Beit Máramaros, including
setting up a searchable online database of
the names of those engraved on the memorial
plaques. At the time of writing the building is
undergoing substantial renovations, including
electrical rewiring, and the installation of new
lighting fixtures and flooring.
After the construction and outfitting of Beit
Máramaros was completed, a second project
commenced: to put pen to paper to write the
history of the martyred communities. The
645 page Yizkor (Memorial) book entitled The
Máramaros Book: In memory of 160 Jewish
communities was first published in Tel Aviv in
1983 by the Beit Máramaros. The project took
ten years to complete. A second edition was
published in 1996.
The Máramaros Yizkor Book
The Máramaros Yizkor Book is written in Hebrew
and has an English preface. The Hebrew portion
meticulously documents 160 rural and urban
communities, including Tetsch, that existed in the
Máramaros region of the Carpathian Mountains.
It tells the story of their foundation, prominent
figures and families who lived in the towns, and
places an emphasis on the community’s religious,
orthodox or Hasidic past, as well as mentioning
notable events. Where possible it provides exact
statistical figures and numerous historical black
and white photographs and maps.
The section on Tetsch is eleven pages long
(pages 303–13). It describes the Tetsch religious
community at length and ends with brief
excerpts from the twenty-eight page diary kept
by Elimelech Basch, a former Tetsch resident.
The diary provides a detailed description of
the Jewish community’s suffering during the
Hungarian and German occupation.