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On the eve of World War II, Sighetu Marmatei, Romania, once Sziget, Maramaros, Hungary, had the highest proportion of Jewish residents of any city in Hungary representing close to 40 percent of the municipality’s population of about 40,000. During four days in May 1944, after having been penned into two ghetto areas for several weeks along with several thousand of their relatives and other Jewish residents from the smaller communities surrounding Sighet, almost all of the Sighet Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
Jews first appeared in Sziget, located on the Tisza River in northern Transylvania, at the beginning of the 18th century. A Hungarian land census of 1728 lists only four Jews; a 1746 census reports 10 families with 39 persons. The first partition of Poland in 1772 gave southeastern Poland to the Austrian Empire, which it renamed Galicia, and the Jewish population of Maramaros megye (county) swelled as Galician Jews migrated south into Maramaros through the north-south Carpathian Mountain passes. By 1787, the Jewish population of Sziget had grown to 142 souls and in 1828, Sziget recorded 46 Jewish households representing 11 percent of the population. Maramaros was a center of Orthodox and Hasidic life throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1891, Sziget’s Jewish population of 4,960 accounted for 30 percent of the total in that city.
Further information courtesy of various sources, such as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sighetu_Marma%C8%9Biei
Sighetu Marmației (Romanian pronunciation: [%CB%8Csi%C9%A1etu marˈmat͡si.ej], also spelled Sighetul Marmației; German: Marmaroschsiget or Siget; Hungarian: Máramarossziget, Hungarian pronunciation: [%CB%88ma%CB%90r%C9%92m%C9%92ro%CA%83si%C9%A1%C9%9Bt] (About this soundlisten); Ukrainian: Сигіт, romanized: Syhit; Yiddish: סיגעט, romanized: Siget), until 1960 Sighet, is a city (municipality) in Maramureș County near the Iza River, in northwestern Romania.
Sighet | Holocaust Encyclopedia
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/sighet
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Deportation from Sighet | Holocaust Encyclopedia
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/gallery/deportation-from-...