The Jews of Brăila: The Grain Port and the Choral Temple

Brăila, the grain port on the Danube, was one of the largest communities in Wallachia at the end of the 19th century: nearly one resident in six was Jewish. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the first Reform synagogue in the Old Kingdom of Romania opened here in 1863, and Mihail Sebastian was born here. Of some fourteen houses of prayer only the Choral Temple survives, where a small community still prays.

The Grain Port

Brăila was under Ottoman rule from the mid-16th century until 1828. According to Yad Vashem’s Pinkas HaKehillot, Jews, mostly Sephardim, were already living there in the 15th century on what was called “Jewish Street,” and their synagogue and cemetery were destroyed by Russian bombardment in 1819. In 1828 the town had 21 Jewish families. After the Treaty of Adrianople (1829) it was attached to Wallachia and declared a free port, and Jews from northern Moldavia, from Botoșani, Dorohoi and Iași, streamed in.

The growth met official resistance. In 1837, of 72 Jewish families only 14 had residence rights, and the Interior Ministry expelled the rest. In 1847 the courts were forbidden to let Jews buy real estate. Even so the community grew: 1,095 people in 1860, and 9,830 in 1899, about 17% of the population. Jews entered the grain trade, until then in Greek hands, and in 1889 24.4% of the town’s shops were Jewish-owned. In 1909 Jewish grain clerks were barred from the port. In 1903, 439 of the town’s Jews emigrated to the United States.

Synagogues and the Choral Temple

According to the Pinkas, the Sephardi synagogue was built in 1830, with a mikveh in its courtyard, and the Great Synagogue in 1832. Before the First World War the town had eight synagogues and six batei midrash, among them the Tailors’ and the Carpenters’ synagogues. According to testimonies collected by the Centropa archive, Brăila had 14 houses of prayer until 1940. The Great Synagogue on Coroanei Street (today Mihail Sebastian Street) was dismantled, and a hotel now stands on its plot.

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the first Reform synagogue in the Old Kingdom opened in Brăila in 1863. It split the community, and a unified administration was restored only in 1905. The surviving house of prayer is the Choral Temple at Strada Petru Maior 13, on the street once known as “Jewish Street.” Sources disagree on its date: the local press gives 1865, while according to Centropa it was the “Frankishe Schul,” built in 1837 and rebuilt in 1862. The community offices stand opposite the temple.

Today the temple has no rabbi. Services are led by the community’s cantor, and the building is the centre for holidays, concerts by the Maccabi choir and events of the town’s Mihail Sebastian festival.

Rabbis, Zionism and the Press

Rabbi Yaakov Margulies, who came from Khotyn, served the town in 1849–1871, and some of his responsa were printed in Shoel u-Meshiv by Rabbi Joseph Saul Nathansohn of Lviv. His sons and grandson succeeded him. Rabbi Avner Casvan (1831–1898), who served here in 1862–1873, was active in the movement to settle the Land of Israel. Between the wars the rabbis were Dr. Y. Nacht and Dr. M. Thenen.

By 1881 Brăila had a branch of “Yishuv Eretz Israel” led by a twenty-member committee, and the town’s merchants donated to Zikhron Ya’akov and Rosh Pinna. The movement was founded by Elazar Rokach, a native of Safed, who published a Yiddish weekly here from 1897. In 1895 the second national conference of Hovevei Zion met in the town, and in 1908 a conference of Jewish teachers resolved to teach Hebrew as a living language. Brăila’s Zionists opposed the Uganda plan and cabled the Sixth Zionist Congress. Dr. H. Moscovici, a delegate to the Zionist congresses, settled in Palestine in 1910 and died in Rehovot in 1916.

Natives of Brăila

• Mihail Sebastian (Iosif Hechter, 1907–1945), novelist and playwright, was born in Brăila. His novel For Two Thousand Years appeared with an antisemitic preface by his mentor Nae Ionescu, and Sebastian answered him in How I Became a Hooligan. The diary he kept in 1935–1944 was published in 1996 and is one of the key testimonies of Romania’s fascist years. He was killed in a road accident on 29 May 1945.
• Ilarie Voronca (Eduard Marcus, 1903–1946), avant-garde poet, was born in Brăila. He published ten books of poetry in Romanian, settled in Paris and wrote in French, and according to the Pinkas served in the French Resistance during the war.

The Second World War

On 30 September 1940 Jewish grain merchants were attacked, and hundreds of their grain wagons were seized at the port. In November 1940 the Legionaries arrested young Jews, tortured them and extracted confessions of communism, and on 25 November they seized the community bathhouse equipment at gunpoint. In January 1941 the Jewish shops were taken.

From 4 August 1941 Jewish men were drafted for forced labour at Făurei, Țăndărei and the Turcoaia quarry. According to the Pinkas, 14 of them died at the quarry, and the community had them reburied. In June 1943 a levy of 60 million lei was imposed on the community, its share of the four billion extracted from Romania’s Jews. A plan to concentrate the Jews in a ghetto in the village of Pisc was foiled, according to the Pinkas, after the community was warned. There was no mass deportation from the town. The community ran a soup kitchen, an infirmary and a school, and among the Romanians who helped are named the prosecutor Nicu Oprișan and the industrialist Nedelcu Chercea.

After the War and Today

In 1947 Brăila had about 5,950 Jews, among them deportees back from Transnistria and refugees from Bessarabia and Bukovina. By 1950 about 3,500 remained, by 1969 about 1,000, and in 2004 141. Most emigrated to Israel. According to the Federation’s website, the community still operates from Strada Petru Maior.

According to the JewishGen survey, Brăila has two Jewish cemeteries. The larger, at Strada Zambilelor 1, covers about 600 by 400 metres and has more than 5,000 visible stones, many of them broken. The older one, at Strada Al. I. Cuza 75, is much smaller, was damaged during the war and retains only a handful of stones.

Visiting

• The Choral Temple: Strada Petru Maior 13.
• Community office: Strada Petru Maior 14, tel. +40 239 611 230, per the Federation’s website.
• The cemetery: Strada Zambilelor 1, by arrangement with the community.

No fixed opening hours have been published, so visits to the temple and the cemetery should be arranged in advance with the community.