bg Zrenjanin

Edmund Gyarfas House

- Kej 2. Oktobra 17 -
The residential building was built somewhere in the 1880s and since 1909, the building was owned by the Jewish industrialist and merchant, Edmund Gyarfas. He was born in on June 19, 1872, in the family of Albert Rosenthal and Bertha Brill. In 1895, after completing his studies in Budapest and , he moved to Veliki Bečkerek, nowadays Zrenjanin. Since his arrival, he has been active in the city's economy, first in the spirit house Lukač and friends and later in 1911, when he founded his own company called the Trgovačko Joint-Stock Company, of which he will be the general director for the rest of his life. He was also the president of the Loyd company, a long-time vice president of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, a member of the board of the Veliki Bečkerek Savings Bank, and one of the founders of the Torontál Agricultural Machinery Industry in 1918. He was also the benefactor of the Jewish cemetery, the Red Cross, and others.
Edmund Gyarfas
In 1902 he got married to Ilona Fleishman, who was born in a Jewish family on March 25, 1884, in . Together they had a daughter Irenka and two sons Ferenc and Janoš. On April 18, 1941, four days after the German troops entered the city, Edmund and Ilona attempted suicide, taking Veronal at the same time, as they didn't want to allow themselves to be humiliated and tortured. Edmund tragically but dignifiedly ended his life in his home that day, taking a lethal dose. The dose of Veronal that Ilona drank was not enough to kill her and the Germans managed to recover her. She was deported to and was later sent to concentration camp where she was murdered in 1942.
Stolperstein for Edmund and Ilona
The building, which is built in the Neo-Renaissance style, is lavishly decorated with . The building contains four pointed and four segmental pediments, all of which are supported by two . In between them, you'll be able to see two rectangles with cut-out corners. The that are located on both corners of the main facade are different in size.
An old postcard that shows the building