The Jews of Moinești: the Town that Founded Rosh Pinna

Moinești, a small oil town in the Carpathian foothills west of Bacău, was at the end of the 19th century a town whose population was about half Jewish. In 1882 it sent out the first organised group from Romania to settle in the Land of Israel, the group that founded Rosh Pinna, and it was the birthplace of Tristan Tzara, a founder of Dada, and of Rabbi Moses Rosen, Chief Rabbi of Romania. There is no community there today, but the old cemetery on the hill still stands.

Older than the town itself

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, gravestones from 1740 and 1748 show that Jews lived here before the town was founded in 1781. The 1820 census recorded 42 Jewish taxpayers, and according to the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) Jews were then the majority of the inhabitants. In 1880, according to the same source, Jews expelled from the surrounding villages arrived: the population grew, but so did poverty.

The community was formally organised in 1885, when it already numbered about 500 families. According to the Judaica it had five prayer houses and a mikveh, a boys’ primary school (1893) and a girls’ school (1900). The Jewish Encyclopedia, written a few years later, counts three synagogues, a rabbi and three shoḥtim, and describes a community financed by taxes on kosher meat and poultry, the income of the bath it owned and a tax on matzah, with two charitable societies and a Zionist society. The 1899 census counted about 2,400 Jews — 2,398, or 50.6% of the population, according to the Judaica, and 2,363 according to the Jewish Encyclopedia. From late 1899 a steady emigration to America began.

“Through Moinești one reaches the Land of Israel”

Moinești earned its place in history through the settlement movement. Moshe David Schub, born in the town (1854–1938) and a shoḥet there, was according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica one of the founders of a local society for settlement in the Land of Israel. According to the Judaica, in 1881 fifty families organised in the town and sent Schub to the Land of Israel as their emissary; his biographical entry dates the mission to 1882. Schub bought the land of Ja‘una near Safed — where Jews from Safed had tried to found a settlement in 1878, and which had since been abandoned. In the summer of 1882, 22 families from Moinești settled there, and at the end of that year Rosh Pinna was established; Schub was elected head of the settlement committee and obtained permission from the Ottoman authorities in Damascus to build houses. The village marks 12 December 1882, the day its first fields were sown, as its founding day.

Moinești also sent two delegates, David Buckshteter and Mendel Greenberg, to the Focșani conference of early 1882, according to the memorial book of the Bacău community published in Tel Aviv in 1990. According to the same book, 21 people from Moinești came to Bacău to ask for passports to Palestine, and the ship Thetis carried 228 emigrants from Bacău, Moinești and other towns. The Kedem auction house sold a letter of recommendation dated Tammuz 5642 (1882), in which two men of Moinești, Gedalia and Chaim, ask the rabbis of Constantinople to help R. Chaim son of R. Yosef Zvi, who was on his way to settle in the Land of Israel.

The first years were hard, and the settlements of the First Aliyah passed under the patronage of Baron Rothschild. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, Schub refused to cooperate with the Baron’s officials, gave up his land and became headmaster of the settlement’s first Hebrew school. In Moinești itself, writes Lika Avrahami-Guttman in the memorial book, people would later say that “through Moinești one reaches the Land of Israel”. The waves of emigration drained the town of its standing as a Zionist centre, but the youth movements — Hashomer Hatzair, Betar and Gordonia — kept working there and sending members to the Land of Israel. Between the two world wars the Jewish population fell to 1,761, 26.6% of the inhabitants.

Tristan Tzara and Rabbi Moses Rosen

Samuel Rosenstock was born in Moinești on 16 April 1896 into a Jewish family. He studied in Bucharest, adopted the pen name Tristan Tzara, and in First World War Zurich was one of the founders of the Dada movement; he died in Paris in December 1963. On 8 October 1996, the centenary of his birth, the “Dada Monument” by the sculptor Ingo Glass was inaugurated at the entrance to the town — a concrete structure painted red, originally designed in steel. The Bacău memorial book mentions Tzara as an assimilationist, and alongside him Dr Botzu Zelig, who translated Mendele Mocher Sforim’s “Fishke the Lame” into Romanian.

Another son of the town, Rabbi Moses Rosen (1912–1994), served from 1948 as Chief Rabbi of Romania and for decades of the communist period stood at the head of Romanian Jewry.

The Second World War

Moinești remained under Romanian rule throughout the war, and its Jews were not deported to the death camps. But in the summer of 1941, as the war against the Soviet Union began, they were driven from their homes. According to Izidor Kara’s book on the Jews of Bacău, following order no. 817 of 3 July 1941, 4,000–5,000 Jews from Târgu Ocna, Moinești and the villages of the county were evacuated to Bacău, allowed to take only a small part of their belongings. The authorities gave them no help; they were taken in by relatives and by the community’s institutions, schools and synagogues, and the community opened kosher kitchens for them. The Encyclopaedia Judaica, by contrast, says the Jews of Moinești were expelled to Botoșani. Among the evacuees was the physician Dr C. Litman, who according to Kara was sent to labour in Transnistria. A couple, the wife from Moinești, died in 1942 in the sinking of the Struma.

According to the Judaica, about 80 families returned after the war. There were 480 Jews in 1947 and 400 in 1950; emigration to Israel reduced the community, and by 1969 about 15 families remained.

The cemetery on Osoiu Hill

The main Jewish site left in Moinești is the cemetery, on the main road up Osoiu Hill, close to the top. The Romanian Cultural Institute describes it as one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Romania, and its oldest known gravestone is dated 1740. According to surveys collected by JewishGen’s Cemetery Discovery Project, it holds between 500 and 5,000 gravestones, most of them toppled or broken, a pre-burial house with a tahara table, and a wall with a locked gate. The last known burial took place in the 1990s. Storms in 2019 brought down several large stones.

Its preservation is led by the LEOLAM Jewish Heritage Foundation, which has renovated the exterior of the pre-burial house, the entrance and the fence. The foundation holds events at the cemetery as part of the European Days of Jewish Culture: on 11 September 2022 a guided tour for students under the title “1882–2022: Moinești – Rosh Pinna”, and at a later open day the second edition of Solomon Șapira’s book “A Living Legend – Moinești” was presented. We found no current source on a surviving synagogue in the town, and Moinești does not appear on the synagogue list or the community list of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania.

Visiting

• The cemetery: on Osoiu Hill, according to the Romanian Cultural Institute. The gate is locked and no visiting hours have been published; arrange in advance with the LEOLAM Foundation or the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania.
• The Dada Monument: at the entrance to the town, in the open air.
• Community: Moinești has no registered community; the nearest is the Jewish Community of Bacău.
• Nearby: Bacău; Târgu Ocna; Piatra Neamț.