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The Gherla Holocaust Memorial Monument

The Gherla Holocaust Memorial Monument was dedicated on May 22, 2016. The initial idea belonged to Mihai Eisikovits, a survivor of the Ukraine labor camps, who started discussions with the Gherla mayor’s office around 2007-2008. His ideas were also supported by the Teleki family, descendants of Samuel Teleki who used to be the pre-war president of the Jewish community of Gherla. Mike Klein, a former resident of Gherla initiated a fundraising campaign in the United States; he used fundraising tools provided by The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and The United States Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. With the help of a few very generous donors, sufficient funds were raised to build the monument. The idea of the two boulders on a pedestal came from Mr. Mihai Eisikovits as a reminder of the stone quarries where many of the Holocaust victims were forced into slave labor. Architects Dominic and Raul Teleki, great grandsons of Gherla resident and Holocaust victim Samuel Teleki, produced the architectural design for the memorial wall, the benches and the boulders on the pedestal. The construction of the monument was executed by “Granit KTK – Kötő Brothers” under the careful guidance of the architectural firm of Bogdan Suciu Ciulei. Both companies are local to Gherla. The Gherla Mayor’s Office helped obtain the necessary permits and participated in organizing the unveiling ceremony. The Jewish Community of Gherla, through Alexandru Sommer and Mike Klein, with participation from members from Romania, Israel, and the United States, coordinated all the activities related to the construction of the monument. The Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies of the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj helped validate facts about the deportation of the Gherla Jews and identify those who died because of the Holocaust. The names of the victims were gathered from various sources: the Yizkor book written in 1971 by Michael Bar-on (Deutsch Mecsi), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum database and, most importantly, from the Yad Vashem database where all the pages of testimony have been researched. All the known families from Gherla now living in Israel, Canada, United States and Australia were contacted to help validate the names of the martyrs. Living relatives of those who perished in the Holocaust augmented the list by providing additional testimonials. Based on this, 1,040 names were identified and inscribed on the wall of the monument. For the most part, the spelling of each name is as it was in the original document identifying the person as a martyr. We also researched the names of the villages from where Jewish residents were sent to the Gherla ghetto. We found 44 villages. This brochure has the names of all 1,040 identified victims, as well as the names of the villages, in both Romanian and Hungarian versions. If other names are identified at a later date, they will be added to the monument. Above the names on the memorial wall is a Hebrew quote from the “AVINU MALKEINU” prayer. In English the prayer translates to: “OUR FATHER, OUR KING, ACT FOR THE SAKE OF THOSE WHO WERE MURDERED FOR YOUR HOLY NAME…(REMEMBER THEM)”.