Zala House

According to old images, the building had already been erected when the ‘Millenium’ Roman-Catholic church was being built (1896-1900) in Coronini Square (today Romanilor Square). This fact is further clarified by the Heritage of Timișoara team, with the support of the architect Mihai Opriș, by discovering the building permit, issued on March 13, 1897, to Tunner Lajos.

Thanks to to Getta Neumann, the author of In the footsteps of Jewish Timișoara guidebook, we learn that in the first decades of the 20th century, the house belonged to Ferenc Zala (Hungarian name from Zeidner). In 1931, he dies, and the house is left to his wife Regina and children Elena and Andrei. Regina remarries the merchant Alexandru Friedmann, who appears as the owner of the house both in the commercial catalog from 1938 and in the List of telephone subscribers from 1959. Zala's daughter, Elena, was married to Lorand Bloch, born in 1909. In 1941, he was detached to the working camp at Păuliş-Ghioroc (Arad county), where he died, on November 12th, 1943.

In 2014, the first and only Stolperstein (cobblestone-size concrete cube, commemorating victims of Nazi extermination or persecution) in Timişoara was set here, commemorating Lorand Bloch.