The Jews of Piatra Neamț: “The Jerusalem of Romania” Below the Carpathians

Piatra Neamț, a market town at the foot of the Eastern Carpathians on the Bistrița river, was at the start of the 20th century a town where half the inhabitants were Jews. In 1912 Nahum Sokolow called it “the Jerusalem of Romania.” Of a community of more than eight thousand, about a hundred and fifty Jews, two synagogues and a cemetery remain today.

Beginnings: Tombstones and Registers

Place names such as Jidovina and Valea Jidanului (“the Jew’s Valley”) suggest, according to Yad Vashem’s Pinkas HaKehillot, a long Jewish presence in the area. The earliest dated evidence is a tombstone of 1627 in the old cemetery. The organised community is documented from the 18th century: the burial society’s register, with its statutes, survives from 1771, and the synagogue was rebuilt in wood under a princely permit of 1766. The burial society in effect ran the community. Its warden and the rabbi could punish offenders, and supervisors checked weights, measures and Sabbath observance.

In official documents the community was called “the Jewish Nation” or “the Kahal of the Jews of Piatra,” and it answered to the starost and the Hakham Bashi of Iași. In 1819 the head of the Jewish guild, Bercu Leibu, was also deputy to the chief of the town police.

Growth in the 19th Century

The figures tell the story: 120 Jewish taxpayers in 1803, 681 Jews in 1831, 1,760 in 1838, 3,900 in 1859 (about a third of the population), 8,361 in 1894 and 8,489 in 1907, about half the town. Trade in farm produce, timber, grain and cattle was almost entirely in Jewish hands. In 1891 the town had 417 Jewish-owned shops. Jews dominated crafts such as hat-making, watchmaking and jewellery, and in the 1902 count of craftsmen 267 of the 376 independent masters were Jews. Jewish industrialists built mills and factories for ink, beer, cloth, spirits, leather and oil, and brought gas lighting to the town.

Beside the great synagogue stood 16 houses of prayer and study, among them those of the tailors, the peddlers, Chabad, and the craftsmen’s “Shevet Achim,” all with libraries. Welfare institutions included a hekdesh, an old-age home of 1898 and a hospital of 1905. A new cemetery was opened in 1872.

Growth came with persecution. In 1821, during the Greek revolt, Jews were robbed and murdered, and Turkish troops prevented a wider massacre. In the 1840s Jews from surrounding villages were arrested on a blood libel and tortured, and were freed only after Moses Montefiore obtained a release order from the Sultan. Further libels followed in 1860 and 1891, and in 1890 the municipality demolished about a hundred Jewish homes on the grounds that they might collapse.

“The Jerusalem of Romania”

Piatra Neamț was one of the centres of early Zionism in Romania. A Hovevei Zion branch was founded in 1894, and in the late 1890s youth societies such as “Bnei Zion Yehuda Halevi” and “Bnot Zion Dr. Herzl” appeared. In 1899 the town’s rabbi, H. L. Loebel, published a German pamphlet on Zionism and religion. On 30 December 1906 a national Zionist conference on culture met in the town, and in 1909 the Hebrew monthly Ha-Me’orer appeared here, edited by M. Braunstein-Mibashan and A. L. Zissu. After the First World War the local Zionist federation had 700 members (1919), and in 1929 the Zionist list won a majority on the community board.

Economic hardship and antisemitism drove many to emigrate. In 1900 groups of “Fussgeyers,” emigrants who set out on foot, left the town, among them “Lev Ehad” with 59 people. Other groups were turned back by the border authorities.

The town produced the writer and journalist H. S. Streitman; A. L. Zissu, writer and leader of the Zionist underground during the Holocaust; the historian Jean Juster, who fell in the First World War; and Moshe Weissman-Amir, president of the Zionist Organisation of Romania and later Israel’s ambassador to the Benelux countries. The surrealist painter Victor Brauner, born in 1903, is regarded as the community’s most famous son.

Between the Wars and under Antonescu

In 1930 the town had 7,595 Jews, 24% of the population. The 1920s and 1930s were years of violence: in 1925, after a visit by A. C. Cuza, riots broke out on Yom Kippur, and in 1928, 63 tombstones were overturned in the cemetery. In 1937, 26 of the town’s 28 Jewish lawyers were barred from practising.

Under the “National Legionary State” in late 1940, Jews could not be buried until a ransom was paid to the Legionaries’ fund, wealthy Jews were tortured into signing payment pledges, and Jewish shops were handed to outside “partners.” Under the Antonescu regime men were drafted for forced labour: in May 1941 about 500 Jews were sent to dig trenches and another 500 were drafted into labour battalions. On 18 June 1941 the police chief ordered the deportation of the county’s Jews aged 16 to 60 to Târgu Jiu. After pleas, one person per family was taken, and about 1,500 were held in camps in the town itself. Twenty-one Jews were deported to Transnistria. The Jews of the county’s villages were concentrated in Piatra Neamț and Târgu Neamț.

In 1941 about 7,000 Jews lived in the town, 600 of them refugees, and 4,000 depended on community support. The Jewish schools kept working, and a high school was set up alongside the elementary school. The community opened a Children’s Home for orphans brought back from Transnistria. A new study by the historian Emanuel Bălan (2025) describes the confiscations, the expulsions from the villages and the forced labour in the county as an “internal Holocaust.”

After the War and Today

In 1947 about 8,000 Jews lived in the town, many of them deportees from the villages who settled there. In the following decades most emigrated to Israel. By 2003, 153 Jews remained, and recent sources speak of about 140 community members. The community, led by Emil Nicolae Nadler, maintains the two synagogues in the courtyard on Strada Ernici and hosts cultural events in them.

The old cemetery on Cârloman hill, by the hospital in the town centre, closed to burials in 1860 according to JewishGen. It is fenced, some stones are broken, and vegetation makes access difficult. The new cemetery opened in 1872, was enlarged in 1903 and is still in use, with a lower section at street level and an upper section up the hill.

Visiting

Visits to the synagogues and cemeteries are arranged in advance with the Jewish Community of Piatra Neamț, Strada Petru Rareș 7, tel. +40 233 223 815, per the Federation’s website. No fixed hours are published. What to see:

• The wooden Baal Shem Tov synagogue and the Leipziger synagogue, Strada Dimitrie Ernici 7
• The old cemetery on Cârloman hill, among the oldest in Moldavia
• The active cemetery and its upper section on the hillside

For the wooden synagogue, see our story on the Baal Shem Tov synagogue.