Spitalul evreiesc din Satu Mare
The Jewish Hospital in Satu Mare

Summary/Abstract: History of the Jewish hopital in Satu Mare starts with the 19th century when the Jewish community in the area begin to organize more caritable settlements and entities to support the old people, unwell or having low income. They created within the first half of the 20th century the Committee of the Jewish Hospital that deal with funds raising and menaging the hospital building. 132 donators, partly from Satu Mare, partly from abroad took part in. Their names were engraved on a black marbre plaque we can find in the Orthodox Jewish Cemetery today. Building and equipping the hospital were impeled by the Jewish hospitals in Oradea and Cluj opening. So the hospital in Baia Mare was innaugurated in September 25, 1937. Dr. Fekete Samu, an ophthalmologist, was the first manager there. The hospital had then 50 beds, the largest part of the hospital wards being double-bedded. With the most modern medical devices, the hospital offered medical services to all patients no matter what was their confession. The kosher meal was cooked in the hospital kitchen. Beginning with May 1944, the local Jews were confined in the ghetto set in the center of the city. Dr. Fekete Samu organized there another hospital for the Jewish community. The old hospital was requisitioned by the army and used for their own needs till the end of World War II. The first years after the war made the building of the Jewish hospital play a double role. The Jews who came back home from different regions where they had been transported, wounded souls and bodies, couldn’t come home or to their families. They came back in a bombarded town where their houses were burnt or plundered. At the end of 1948, the Jewish hospital was nationalized and transformed in TB hospital, a part it plays today too.

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