The Jews of Brașov: From a Closed Saxon Town to a Community of Thousands

A closed Saxon city that for centuries would not let Jews settle within its walls, yet grew a community of thousands. The story of the Jews of Brașov (Kronstadt in German, Brassó in Hungarian) is one of traders and refugees, of a split between Orthodox and Neolog, and of a war in which the city stayed on the Romanian side of the border.

A City of Saxon Guilds

Brașov was founded in the Middle Ages as one of the Saxon towns of southern Transylvania, and for generations its guilds jealously guarded the rights of residence and trade. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Jews are mentioned in the city from 1492, but only as temporary residents or travellers taking part in the trade between Hungary, Wallachia (Muntenia) and the Ottoman Empire. The Archives of Jewish Bukovina and Transylvania at the Leo Baeck Institute add that in the sixteenth century Jewish traders supplied the local guilds with wool and dyes from Ottoman lands, and that in the seventeenth century Jewish residence in the Principality of Transylvania was restricted to Alba Iulia.

An article in the Hungarian Jewish magazine Szombat (1993) describes Brașov as a town closed to nobles and Jews alike; from the time of Maria Theresa Jews came to its fairs to sell second-hand clothes but were not allowed to stay. The sources we checked do not confirm that the first traders were specifically Sephardim from Ottoman lands, so we do not state it.

1807 and 1826: The First Families

According to the website of the Jewish Community of Brașov, the first Jews to settle permanently in the city are recorded only in 1807, with the approval of the town council. The records of the Brașov hevra kadisha also begin in that year, according to Mircea Moldovan’s survey. Community tradition names the first settler as Aron Löbl ben Jehuda, whose name heads the list of the community’s presidents. The sources agree that the first settlers came from Wallachia, chiefly from Bucharest, fleeing the plague and wars that struck the principality between 1811 and 1829.

The sources differ on the details of recognition. The community website says the community was officially founded in 1826 by imperial decree, with four families; the Leo Baeck Institute archive counts eleven families (46 people) who that year received permission to form a community with its own statutes and elected leadership; and the Encyclopaedia Judaica says several families were allowed to settle permanently in 1826 and received the right to organise a community only in 1828. According to the community website, Jews were permitted only the trades the Saxons did not want: most were merchants, a few were hatters, tailors, painters and jewellers.

According to Szombat, three Brașov Jews served as soldiers in the Hungarian army during the 1848 revolution. Only the civil emancipation of Hungarian Jewry in 1867, the Leo Baeck Institute archive notes, put an end to recurring demands to expel the Jews from the town.

Growth, a School and a Split

The community grew slowly: 67 people in 1850 and 103 in 1865. A Jewish school opened in 1860 according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica (other sources give 1864), and in 1870 the Hebrew poet Solomon Ehrenkranz was invited to teach Hebrew there. In 1868, after the Congress of Hungarian Jewry, the community joined the Neolog movement, and in 1877 a separate Orthodox community broke away. From then on each had its own rabbi, synagogue and cemetery, though the school continued to serve both.

The end of the century brought rapid growth: 769 Jews in 1890, 1,198 in 1900 and 1,280 in the 1910 census. In 1892 the Neolog community elected its first rabbi, Dr Lajos Papp, who served until 1918, and in 1899–1901 it built the great synagogue on Strada Poarta Schei to designs by Lipót Baumhorn. The synagogue and the two congregations are covered in separate articles in this section.

Between the Wars

In 1918 Transylvania passed from Hungary to Romania. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, many of the city’s Jews had assimilated into Hungarian and German culture, and a minority into Romanian. Zionist youth movements appeared immediately after the war; the community website also mentions a branch of the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO) founded in 1912 and the Hakoah sports club, founded in 1921.

The 1930 census counted 2,594 Jews in Brașov. In the late 1920s they included entrepreneurs and merchants, clerks, physicians, engineers, lawyers and teachers, and the Hungarian daily Brassói Lapok was Jewish-owned and Jewish-edited. Rabbi Ernő Deutsch led the Neolog community from 1927 to 1950, and Rabbi David Sperber the Orthodox community from 1925 to 1950.

The Second World War: On the Romanian Side of the Border

Under the Second Vienna Award of August 1940, Northern Transylvania was handed to Hungary and Brașov remained in Romania. Its Jews were therefore spared the deportations to Auschwitz that struck the Jews of Northern Transylvania in the spring and summer of 1944. But the Legionary regime, and then that of Ion Antonescu, applied the antisemitic laws here too: the “Romanianisation” of Jewish property, the confiscation of communal buildings, the expulsion of Jewish children from state schools, and forced labour for men, introduced by a decree of 4 December 1940. A four-grade Jewish school operated in Brașov in 1940–1944 for the excluded pupils.

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Jewish men, many of them from the surrounding region, were drafted into local labour battalions and survived the war. Szombat adds that in 1942 the great synagogue was turned into a food warehouse. Legionnaires also damaged the city’s synagogues, though the sources disagree on the date: November 1940 or 1941. In the summer of 1942 the Antonescu regime agreed in writing to deport the Jews of the Regat and southern Transylvania to the Bełżec death camp, and by the autumn the plan had been shelved (Wiesel Commission report). Romania’s Holocaust institute records Anghel Anuțoiu, a Righteous Among the Nations, who warned the Jews of Brașov and several other communities of planned arrests.

The community website describes wartime Brașov as a relatively safe place that drew Jewish refugees. However, we found no authoritative source giving the number of refugees from Northern Transylvania in the city. The population figures also differ: the Leo Baeck Institute archive gives 2,760 people in 1940, while the community website estimates about 6,000.

After the War: Emigration and Decline

Immediately after the war the community grew again, mainly through refugees from Moldavia, Bessarabia and Bukovina; according to the community website it reached about 6,000. In 1949 the two communities were merged into one with an Orthodox section. After the founding of the State of Israel mass emigration began, in waves in 1951, 1956 and 1964 and on through the 1970s to the 1990s. The 1956 census counted 1,759 Jews in the city and 4,035 in the region; in 1968 about 2,000 lived in the city.

The 2011 census counted 281 Jews in Brașov, more than 40 per cent of them aged over 60. The community, led for more than 27 years by the engineer Tiberiu Roth, maintains the Beth Israel synagogue (the former Neolog synagogue), a kosher restaurant and a medical office, and its rabbi is Zvika Kfir.

Visiting

The community office and the Beth Israel synagogue are at Strada Poarta Schei 27, on the edge of the old town. According to the community website (October 2026), the synagogue is open to visitors Monday–Thursday 09:00–16:00 and 16:30–19:30, Friday 09:00–18:00 and Sunday 11:00–18:00. There are no visits and no photography on Shabbat. Groups of more than 20 are asked to book by phone a day in advance, through the community office: +40 757 570 803.

• The Beth Israel synagogue: see the article on the synagogue.
• The former Orthodox synagogue at Strada Castelului 64: see the article on the Orthodox and Neolog congregations.
• The cemeteries on Strada Crișan and Strada Cloșca: see the article on the cemetery.

Brașov is about 25 km from Predeal in the Prahova Valley; a separate route in this section links the two.