Kahal Grande: The Life and Death of Bucharest’s Great Spanish Temple

On the evening of 21 January 1941, Legionnaires poured fuel from many canisters inside and around the Great Spanish Temple on Strada Negru Vodă and set it alight. The building, which had stood for more than 120 years and was considered the most beautiful synagogue in Bucharest, burned to the ground. This is the biography of a building that no longer exists, as far as it can be reconstructed from letters, photographs and testimony.

A Permit in 1818: A Community Seeks a Home

Kahal Grande, the “Great Congregation” (Kahal Kadosh Gadol; in Romanian, Templul Mare Spaniol), was the main synagogue of Bucharest’s Sephardic community, the first Jewish community in the city. The community’s wider history is told in a separate article. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the Sephardim had until then prayed in a rented house in Mahalaua Popescului, and in 1818 they received permission to build a synagogue.

Sources differ on the year of construction itself. The community leader Lazar Ascher wrote in 1904 that the synagogue was built in 1817; the permit dates from 1818, a year several researchers also give; while the magazine Historia and Radio Romania International give 1819. The synagogue stood on Strada Negru Vodă in the Văcărești quarter, the heart of the old Jewish district. Historia gives the street number as 12, while Ascher’s letter gives number 10.

Rebuilding and a Moorish Interior

The building seen in early 20th-century photographs was not the one built in the 1810s. Here, too, the sources differ: according to Ascher’s letter the synagogue was rebuilt in 1852, while Radio Romania International dates the rebuilding to 1890.

The most detailed description of the building comes from that same letter, which Ascher sent on 16 February 1904 to the Spanish senator Ángel Pulido and which Pulido published in his book on the Sephardic Jews and the Spanish language. Ascher describes a Moorish-style interior, 350 seats for men on the ground floor and 150 for women in the gallery, with the left and right galleries reached by entrances separate from the main door. The accompanying photographs show the façade, the bimah and a view toward the organ. In the synagogue’s courtyard, according to the letter, four rooms for the community’s boys’ school had been built as early as 1817.

Its standing in the city was unique. The Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that it was considered the most beautiful synagogue in Bucharest, and Chief Rabbi Alexandru Șafran remembered it, as quoted by Ciuciu, as “maybe the most beautiful in Bucharest”.

The Night of 21 January 1941: Fuel, Fire and a Fallen Star of David

On 21 January 1941 the Legionnaires of the Iron Guard rose against General Ion Antonescu. In the three days of the rebellion and the pogrom that accompanied it, 125 Jews were murdered in Bucharest, and homes, shops and synagogues were looted and set on fire. The Great Spanish Temple went up in flames on the very first evening.

The pianist Dan Mizrahy told the Centropa project that on that evening his aunt came to tell the family that the temple was in flames. According to his account, the attackers poured fuel from many canisters inside and outside the building and set it on fire, and it burned to the ground. The historian Anca Ciuciu lists the Great Temple among the synagogues burned, alongside the Small Spanish Temple, Kahal Cicu.

The fire was documented. Ciuciu mentions a night photograph of the blaze dated 22 January 1941, one of the few images of the fire itself; an anonymous photograph of the ruins appears in Matatias Carp’s Cartea Neagră (The Black Book), the record of the persecution of Romania’s Jews; and a 1946 World Jewish Congress documentary includes eight photographs of the site. One of them, a charred Star of David fallen from the façade to the floor, became one of the defining images of the pogrom.

The Years of Ruin

What happened to the building after the war is unclear. According to Dan Mizrahy, the ruins remained for many years, a testimony to the tragedy of that night. Wikipedia and other secondary sources claim instead that the synagogue was rebuilt after the war, but we found no solid source for this. The Sephardic community itself declined after 1948, with communist nationalization and emigration to Israel.

The Boulevard of Union: Erasure

Whatever remained on the site was erased by Nicolae Ceaușescu’s “systematization” of Bucharest. Historia lists the Great Spanish Temple among the synagogues demolished to make way for the new civic center, calling its loss a blow to the capital’s architectural landscape. Sources differ on the year: according to Wikipedia it was demolished in 1985, together with the Malbim Synagogue, to make way for the Boulevard of Union (Bulevardul Unirii); according to Radio Romania International, in 1987. The razing of the quarter as a whole is the subject of our article on the vanished Jewish quarter.

Today nothing of the building survives. Strada Negru Vodă still exists in the area of the Boulevard of Union and the Unirea shopping center, but the exact position of the plot in today’s street plan has not been firmly identified, and we know of no memorial plaque.

Visiting

There is no building to visit. Those who wish to stand on the spot can go to the area of Strada Negru Vodă, at the edge of the Boulevard of Union, and view it alongside the archival photographs.

• Not to be confused with: the (Ashkenazi) Great Synagogue on Strada Vasile Adamache and the Holy Union Temple on Strada Mămulari, home of the Museum of the History of the Jews in Romania, both still standing. These are separate institutions, a short walk from the area.
• To complete the picture: the Sephardic Jewish Cemetery, across the road from Bellu Cemetery in the south of the city, is the main physical trace of the community that prayed here.
• Arrangements: visits to the active sites should be arranged in advance with the Jewish Community of Bucharest or the Federation (FCER).