The Jews of Fălticeni: A Border Shtetl with a Jewish Majority

Fălticeni was born as a market town on the border between Moldavia and Austrian Bukovina, and Jews were a majority from the start: in 1859 they made up 63.5% of its population. Of all its synagogues only one remains, the Great Synagogue, one of whose walls collapsed in 2021. A few dozen Jews are left, and much of the town’s story is now told by its two cemeteries.

A town founded by contract

According to the local historian Artur Gorovei, quoted in Yad Vashem’s Pinkas HaKehillot, three Jewish brothers were already living here in 1772. The Encyclopaedia Judaica dates the first Jewish settlement to 1772–1774. The town itself, first called Șoldănești, was officially founded around 1780 as a trading centre between Moldavia and Bukovina, which had just passed to Austria. On 1 July 1780 the estate owner Ioniță Başotă signed a contract with the Jews: they could build a synagogue, provided it looked from the outside like an ordinary house, receive a plot for a cemetery and trade. The contract fixed their taxes and set no limit on the number of settlers. Local sources describe Fălticeni as the first town in Moldavia founded by Jews under a charter from Prince Constantin Moruzi, but this is tradition rather than a finding of scholarship.

Jews came from nearby Baia, from Bukovina, Bessarabia and Galicia. In 1823 the estate’s heirs cancelled the contract, and the community fought them for years, with the help of the Austrian and Russian consuls, until in 1836 it agreed to buy the town centre from the owner. In 1821, during the Greek Eteria revolt, the rebels demanded a ransom, tortured the community’s leaders and murdered several of them, and the town was looted and burned.

A Jewish majority

The community grew from 1,500 people in 1803 to 4,152 in 1838 and 5,767 in 1859, 63.5% of the population. Even in 1899 Jews were 57% of the town. Most were artisans, the rest merchants. The annual fair, which in the mid-19th century lasted three weeks, drew traders from across the border. Jews exported timber and hides and founded a bank, tanneries and two printing houses. A mikveh and a community hospital opened in 1857. After the First World War, when Bukovina became part of Romania, Fălticeni ceased to be a border town and the Jews’ economic position declined. By 1930, 4,216 Jews remained, 36.6% of the population.

Synagogues and rabbis

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, many of the town’s Jews were Sadigura or Chabad Hasidim. The Pinkas lists eleven synagogues and prayer houses, among them the Great Synagogue, the Chabad synagogue and the prayer houses of the tailors and the shoemakers. Local sources count more: 34 synagogues and prayer houses in 1916. The difference probably lies in how small prayer rooms were counted.

Among the town’s rabbis were Rabbi Efraim HaLevi Horowitz, who served from 1846 until his death in 1864, and his successor Rabbi Yehoshua Falk Zeev Wolfsohn (1835–1915), author of works on ethics, exegesis and law. Rabbi Avraham Aryeh Leib Rosen, appointed rabbi of the Chabad synagogue in 1916, wrote the responsa Eitan Aryeh and was the father of Rabbi Moses Rosen, Chief Rabbi of Romanian Jewry from 1948. The last rabbi, Yaakov Schechter-Brezis, served from 1937 to 1950.

Natives of the town

Fălticeni’s best-known son is Israel Joseph Benjamin, who called himself “Benjamin II”. Born in the town in 1818, from 1844 he travelled for years in search of the Ten Lost Tribes, through the Land of Israel, Syria, Kurdistan, Persia, India and Afghanistan, and later North Africa and America. His books, “Eight Years in Asia and Africa” (1858) and “Three Years in America” (1863), appeared in German, after a French edition of his first journeys. He died in London in 1864.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica also lists among the town’s people the mathematician David Rimer and the journalist Hayyim Rimer, who edited Revista Cultului Mosaic, the journal of Romanian Jewry, from 1980 to 1994, and the Hebrew writer Mattityahu Simhah Rabener, born in Lemberg, who ran the town’s Jewish school. The same list names the painter Reuven Rubin, but the Encyclopaedia’s own entry on Rubin says he was born in Galați, so his link to Fălticeni is unclear. The Hebrew poet Jacob Fichman, sometimes attributed to the town, was born in Bălți in Bessarabia.

Persecution and the Second World War

Antisemitism reached Fălticeni before the war. In 1917 some forty Jewish women were expelled on suspicion of being relatives of Austrian subjects, and wandered for two months before returning on Yom Kippur. In 1932 members of Cuza’s party beat a Jew, Yitzhak Nachum, to death, and in 1936 Iron Guard men looted Jewish shops.

In 1941 the town had 4,020 Jews, about a third of its population. Under the Legionary regime a “green house” in the town centre was used to torture Jewish merchants until they paid. In June 1941, on the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union, a German headquarters was set up in the town, and the synagogues were confiscated and used as barracks. From 18 August 1941 Jews had to wear a yellow armband. The men were held in camps, and about a thousand were sent to forced labour in Bessarabia, mainly at the Tighina monastery. Jewish doctors were sent to typhus-stricken areas of Transnistria. Fălticeni lay in the Old Kingdom, and its Jews were spared the mass deportation of their neighbours in Bukovina, but many died in forced labour.

In the spring of 1944, as the front approached, the town was evacuated. Its Jews found refuge in Suceava and Botoșani, and when they returned about six months later their homes had been stripped. Typhus broke out, and the community hospital had lost its equipment. With help from the Joint the community recovered, and a Jewish secondary school operated in the town from 1944 to 1948.

After the war: the synagogue and the cemeteries

In 1947 Fălticeni had 4,700 Jews, and in 1950 about 3,000. Most emigrated to Israel, where an association of former residents is active. By 1969 some 150 families and one synagogue remained; in 1994 the town had 51 Jews, and in 2021 the community had 14 members.

The Great Synagogue was built of wood in 1795, according to local sources. According to the Pinkas it was rebuilt in 1852 and decorated with wall paintings. Today it is a stone and brick building with walls about a metre thick and tall windows. Inside, according to the local press, are wall paintings of the Land of Israel “by painters who never visited it”. At 7:30 a.m. on 10 June 2021 the synagogue’s north wall collapsed onto the sports ground of the neighbouring school. No one was hurt. The community’s president, Robert Steinmetz, said the community had just received funding for a feasibility study for restoration, and that the last event in the building had taken place in 2019. We found no more recent information on its condition.

JewishGen’s cemetery survey records two cemeteries. The old one, at Strada Nuțu Ema 49, covers about 250 by 400 metres and holds about 4,500 gravestones. The survey dates its oldest known stone to about 1850, although a local source mentions a gravestone from 1780. The new one, at Strada Broșteni 76, is larger, with about 12,000 gravestones, a purification house and a memorial to Jewish soldiers. In both, many stones are broken or toppled.

Visiting

Arrange your visit with the Jewish Community of Fălticeni, Strada Sucevei 85, tel. +40 744 358 934, per the Federation of Jewish Communities’ website. The Great Synagogue is at Strada Ana Ipătescu 149 according to French Wikipedia, and access to it, as to the cemeteries, is by prior arrangement only. Fălticeni is about 22 km from Suceava and can be combined in one day with Botoșani or with the Gah synagogue in Suceava.