The Jews of Râmnicu Sărat: the 1855 Synagogue and Saul Steinberg’s Birthplace

Râmnicu Sărat, a town on the road from Bucharest to Focșani at the north-eastern edge of Muntenia, was home to a Jewish community of about a thousand, and the birthplace, in 1914, of the artist Saul Steinberg. The community’s synagogue, built in 1855, still stands on Strada Zorilor, and the town has two Jewish cemeteries. Like all the Jews of the Regat, those of Râmnicu Sărat lived through the war under Antonescu’s laws, without deportation to the death camps.

A community in Râmnicu Sărat county

Râmnicu Sărat was the seat of a county of the same name, on the border between Muntenia and Moldavia. Yad Vashem’s Pinkas HaKehillot Romania has an entry on it in its section on the Regat, but the entry has not been translated into English. According to JewishGen’s Cemetery Discovery Project, citing census data, the town had 519 Jews in 1899 and 1,029 in 1930. The county as a whole counted, according to tables based on the Romanian statistics of the period, 1,624 Jews in 1894, 1,835 in 1899 and 1,296 in 1912, about 1% of the population.

Very little is known about the community’s institutions. A small collection at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), dating from 1925–1948, gives a glimpse of its life between the wars and after: a printed pamphlet of the community’s statutes, synagogue documents, letters of Rabbi Dr Menachem Shafram, tax papers and correspondence of local Jewish businessmen. The collection has not been digitised.

The synagogue of 1855

The synagogue stands at Strada Zorilor 3, according to the list of synagogues of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, which dates it to 1855 and does not mark it as active. The 2010 survey of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad gives the same address and date and records the building as not in use. According to a description on the Religiana site, based on the Historic Synagogues of Europe database, the prayer hall is lit by 16 lancet windows on the north side, six on the south and four on the east. A second row of small round windows lights the women’s gallery, which runs around the hall on three sides, and a semicircular apse on the east side marks the niche of the Torah ark. The vestibule also serves as a small prayer room.

Saul Steinberg, son of the town

Saul Steinberg, one of the great illustrators and artists of the 20th century, was born in Râmnicu Sărat on 15 June 1914 by the Julian calendar then in use in Romania (28 June in the Gregorian calendar), to Moritz Steinberg and Rosa Iacobson. According to the chronology of the Saul Steinberg Foundation, the family moved to Bucharest as early as 1915, and during the First World War the mother and children lived in Buzău with the grandparents on both sides.

In 1932 Steinberg enrolled at the University of Bucharest but hardly attended classes because of rampant antisemitism, and in September 1933 he was turned down by the Faculty of Architecture, probably because the unofficial quota for Jews was already full. In November 1933 he moved to Milan to study architecture, and there Mussolini’s racial laws of 1938 caught up with him. According to the Norman Rockwell Museum, he went into hiding early in 1941, was arrested and held for a month in a detention camp, and reached America via Portugal. His drawings appeared in The New Yorker for six decades. He died in New York on 12 May 1999.

The war years

Râmnicu Sărat was in the Regat, which stayed under Romanian rule, and its Jews were deported neither to Auschwitz nor, in any general deportation, to Transnistria. But all the measures of the Antonescu regime applied to them: according to the Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, the racial laws of August 1940, the expropriations of “Romanianisation”, and the registration of tens of thousands of Jews across the country for forced labour. In the summer of 1942 the regime agreed to deport the Jews of the Regat and Southern Transylvania to the Bełżec death camp, but the plan was never carried out. We found no accessible source describing the community’s own experience in these years.

The cemeteries and the community today

According to the JewishGen survey of 2001, the town has two Jewish cemeteries. The old one, from the 19th century, lies on a hillside behind a locked fence, and only a few limestone and sandstone gravestones with Hebrew inscriptions remain. The newer one, from the end of the 19th century, is enclosed by a wall and a locked gate, and hundreds to thousands of gravestones are visible, more than three-quarters of them toppled or broken, with inscriptions in Hebrew, German and Romanian. It has a section for kohanim and a memorial to Jewish soldiers, and the last known burial was in January 2000.

According to the same survey, fewer than ten Jews lived in the town in 2001. The Federation lists Râmnicu Sărat as an obște, a sub-community, attached to the Focșani community, with a local person responsible, Bernard Weiner.

Visiting

• Synagogue: Strada Zorilor 3, according to the Federation. The building is not in use, and no opening hours are published.
• Cemeteries: both are locked; no official addresses are published. Arrange your visit in advance.
• Arrangements: the Jewish Community of Focșani, Strada Oituz 4, to which Râmnicu Sărat is attached, according to the Federation.
• On the way: the town lies on the road between Buzău and Focșani, so the synagogue of Buzău, Râmnicu Sărat and the active synagogue of Focșani can be combined in one day.