The Focșani Congress: From a Moldavian Schoolroom to Rosh Pinna and Zikhron Ya’akov

Fifteen years before the Zionist Congress in Basel, in the winter of 1881–1882, dozens of delegates from the “Yishuv Eretz Israel” societies of Romania’s towns met in a Jewish school in Focșani. They set up a central committee that organised group emigration, and within a year two settlements stood in the Land of Israel: Rosh Pinna and Zikhron Ya’akov.

Romania in 1881

The Congress of Berlin of 1878 obliged Romania to grant its Jews citizenship, but the promise was hardly kept, and Jews remained “aliens” without rights. In 1881 the wave of pogroms in Russia added to the pressure. According to Radio Romania International, societies supporting emigration and agricultural settlement sprang up mainly in Moldavia, among them in Bârlad and Moinești. As early as late 1880 David Gordon, editor of Hamagid, had called for a central body to coordinate settlement.

Two Days in Focșani

The conference met on 30–31 December 1881 by the Julian calendar then in use in Romania, that is, 11–12 January 1882 by the Gregorian calendar, which is why sources give both dates. It was held at the town’s Jewish boys’ school. According to the National Library of Israel and the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 51 delegates from 32 societies and localities took part; Radio Romania counts 56 delegates from 29 localities.

The chairman was Samuel Pineles (1843–1928), a native of Brody in Galicia who had settled in Galați in 1863. According to the Jews of Focșani heritage site, the secretary was David Rintzler, and the town’s rabbi, Rabbi Moshe Halevy Goldring, was made honorary president.

The Resolutions

The delegates resolved that the most effective solution to “the Jewish question in Romania” was emigration to the Land of Israel and agricultural settlement. They elected a five-member central committee, the “Central Committee for the Settlement of the Land of Israel and Syria,” based in Galați with Pineles at its head. The committee organised emigration, raised funds and sent emissaries to buy land. According to the National Library of Israel, some 120 families, more than 600 people, soon left under its auspices on four voyages, more than half of the first wave of the First Aliyah.

Moinești and Rosh Pinna

The first organised group came from the small town of Moinești. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 50 families there had organised as early as 1881 and sent David Schub to the Land of Israel as their emissary. Schub bought land at Gei Oni near Safed, where Jews from Safed had tried to settle in 1878 and had all but abandoned it. In the summer of 1882, 22 families from Moinești settled there, joined by several families from other Moldavian towns. According to Radio Romania, the Moinești emigrants sailed on the ship Thetis, 228 people.

The settlement was named Rosh Pinna after the verse “The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone” (Psalms 118:22). It marks 12 December 1882, the day the first fields were sown, as its founding day.

Zammarin Becomes Zikhron Ya’akov

A second group, managed directly by the committee, bought land in 1882 on the slopes of Mount Carmel, at a place known in Arabic as Zammarin. According to the Jewish Virtual Library they were about a hundred pioneers from Romania, members of Hovevei Zion. According to the Jews of Focșani heritage site, the first founders of the two settlements included three families from Focșani: those of Israel Sehter, Alter Vainstoc and Itzhak Aaron Apelboim.

The difficulties were greater than expected: rocky soil, malaria and lack of money. In spring 1883 the central committee went bankrupt, and at the end of September 1883 it handed Zammarin over to the patronage of Baron Edmond de Rothschild. The baron named it Zikhron Ya’akov, after his father James (Jacob) de Rothschild. Rosh Pinna also came under his patronage in 1883. Pineles himself continued to raise funds from Rothschild, among them money to buy land in the Golan for Romanian Jews.

The Legacy

At the Kattowitz conference in November 1884 the leadership of Hibbat Zion passed to Russian Jewry. Pineles attended the first ten Zionist Congresses, from Basel in 1897 on, was a founder of the Jewish Colonial Trust, and in 1965 his remains were reinterred in Jerusalem. The historian Israel Gilad, writing on the National Library of Israel’s blog, calls Focșani “the actual first Zionist congress,” while the Romanian historian Liviu Rotman prefers to call the movement “pro-Zionist,” since it did not yet seek a political framework. In July 2026, at the town’s Municipality Days and in the presence of Israel’s ambassador, the mayor of Focșani recalled the conference as “the first Zionist congress.”

Visiting

The exact building of the Jewish boys’ school was not identified in the sources we checked. The starting point for a visit is the synagogue and community office at Strada Oituz 4, tel. +40 237 623 959 per the Federation’s website, by prior arrangement. In Israel the story continues in the old colonies of Rosh Pinna and Zikhron Ya’akov.