The Jews of Bucecea: A Market Town with a Jewish Majority

Bucecea, a small town in the Botoșani area of northern Moldavia, was founded in 1828 as a market town, and for more than a century most of its inhabitants were Jews. In 1937 it had five synagogues, a school and a mikveh. In June 1941 all its Jews were expelled to Botoșani; what remains today is the cemetery, opened when the settlement began.

A town born of a princely charter

According to Yad Vashem’s Pinkas HaKehillot Romania, Bucecea was founded in 1828 with the authorisation of Prince Ioniță Sturdza, ruler of Moldavia, and Jews settled there under the privileges customary in new market towns. JewishGen’s community site, drawing on a 1914 article by the historian Elias Schwarzfeld, adds that the charter was issued on 16 January 1828 and allowed a market town to be built on the estate of the boyar Alexandru Ralet.

The town was Jewish from the start. According to the Pinkas, 98 Jews lived there in 1831, 86.7% of the inhabitants; 523 in 1859 (61.2%); and in 1899, at its peak, 1,281 Jews, 72% of the population. Jews made their living from the cattle trade, taverns, butchery, baking and soap-making, shopkeeping and peddling. In 1910 the town counted 79 merchants, 11 tailors, 8 shoemakers, a tinsmith, 4 carpenters and 37 other craftsmen.

Decrees and riots

Late nineteenth-century Romania denied its Jews citizenship, and life in the market towns depended on the goodwill of local officials. In September 1894 a decree ordered the expulsion of some two hundred of Bucecea’s Jews, but according to the Pinkas it was annulled because the authorities feared the damage to the town’s economy.

On 18 March 1907, during the great Romanian peasant revolt, about a thousand peasants from the surrounding villages descended on the town and looted Jewish shops and homes. According to the Pinkas, 154 Jewish houses were robbed and twenty families were left destitute.

Community life

The community was formally organised in 1900 under a nine-member board. Three quarters of the meat-tax revenue went to the school and the remaining quarter to the needy. According to the Pinkas, the authority of the town’s rabbi extended to the Jews of the surrounding area, a sign of the strength of Hasidism in Bucecea; in 1880 he appointed, with the estate owner’s approval, the rabbi of nearby Herța. The Pinkas does not name the rabbis.

In 1910 the town still had no Jewish school, and children studied in heders. By 1937 the picture had changed: according to the Pinkas, Bucecea then had five synagogues, a school with two teachers, a kindergarten and a kosher mikveh, and the community had a cemetery dating from the beginning of the settlement. The 1930 census recorded 848 Jews in the town, 59.9% of its inhabitants.

June 1941: expulsion to Botoșani

On the eve of the invasion of the Soviet Union, on 18 June 1941, Ion Antonescu ordered the Jews of the villages and small towns of Moldavia to be moved to the county capitals. According to the Wiesel Commission, some 40,000 Jews had been moved in this way by 31 July 1941. Bucecea, where 758 Jews then lived (59.5% of the inhabitants), was one of these towns: according to the Pinkas, when war broke out in June 1941 all its Jews were expelled to Botoșani, the county seat.

The men were conscripted for forced labour, and many were sent to Bessarabia, where they worked in a quarry. Their fate resembled that of most Jews of Romania’s Old Kingdom: dispossession, forced labour and expulsion from the small towns, but not deportation to Transnistria. Neighbouring Dorohoi county was treated differently: according to the Wiesel Commission, Antonescu ordered its Jews deported to Transnistria. The Pinkas mentions no such deportation from Bucecea.

After the war

After the war some of the expellees returned to Bucecea and re-established the community. In 1947, 300 Jews lived in the town. According to JewishGen’s community site, most had left by the late 1950s. The site also notes that thanks to volunteers who indexed the town’s Jewish birth, marriage and death records for 1860–1907, Bucecea is today one of the best-documented Jewish communities in Romania for genealogists.

Visiting

• The cemetery: listed by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania (2007) under the Botoșani community, without a street address. According to the Pinkas, it dates from the beginning of Jewish settlement in the town.
• Arrangements: no visiting hours are published. Contact the Jewish Community of Botoșani in advance, Strada 1 Decembrie 54, according to the Federation.
• Roots: for those tracing family, JewishGen’s community site publishes indexes of the Jewish birth, marriage and death records of Bucecea for 1860–1907, and lists of emigrants from the town.
• Nearby: Botoșani and its Great Synagogue; Ștefănești and its Hasidic court; Dorohoi and Săveni.