The Lugoj Jewish Community Collection represents the most extensive collection surveyed by the Leo Baeck Institute in the course of its survey of material held by existing Jewish communities in Transylvania.  It comprises 25 series and contents range from material related to the community during the second half of the 19^th century, through to the interwar and war-time period, and the decades of mass emigration following the war. Enabling the relatively rapid processing of such an extensive amount of material was the existence of an archival inventory dating to the late 1960s. The inventory had the material arranged by year and title. LBI archivists made the decision to group the material prior to World War II thematically, since not all years contained items and the material was related thematically more so than annually. Thus, the Rabbinate series (Series I) contains correspondence, birth and marriage certificates, and other administrative documents created by the Rabbinate offices from the late 19^th century through to World War II.  Beginning in the early 1940s the amount of material per year went up dramatically and we separated the series by years. Moreover, beginning with the post-war era, the material was very similar from year to year. Thus, every year contains standard accounting files as well as several files of correspondence. In light of the size of this collection and the limited time available to archivists, rarely was the content of the files able to be in detail, where this was possible and content of unusual interest was found, this is noted in the respective series scope and content note. In addition, the decision was made to maintain the integrity of the folder contents, wherever possible, except in the case of unambiguous human error. Thus, it is possible that the contents do not always reflect, exactly, the title of the folder, since we maintained both the original title as well as the folder contents. Please note that because we maintained the integrity of the original folder contents, this means that multiple folders contain documents from the same years, for example correspondence from the 1940s may be found both in the Rabbinate series, if the folder was labelled as “rabbinate correspondence“ as well as in Series IX, Administrative and Correspondence 1943-1945. The only exception to maintaining folder integrity was that some excessively large files were split into two folders. In this case, however, if an especially large folder contained documents spanning a wide period and needed to be divided into two folders, the documents were left in the order they were found, rather than being divided by date, since often documents related to one topic were filed next to each other yet spanned several years. Thus, for example, the four folders “Death and birth certificates, related documents” (box 5, folders 2-5) within the Rabbinate series were originally within one folder and were separated into four folders for easier usage.

A handful of files listed on the inventory were not found, in such a case the file title is still provided on the inventory, with the designation [MISSING], to provide for the chance that the file is discovered at a later point in time. The original inventory from the late 1960s may be found in Series IV: Administrative (1905-1947; 1968); box 10; folder 15.  The file reference number from the original inventory is not included in this finding aid but is within our records, please contact the project director, Julie Dawson at jdawson[at]lbi.cjh.org for more information or to report errors or corrections.