The Jews of Bacău: From a Gravestone of 1703 to the Founders of Zikhron Ya’akov

Bacău, a trading town on the Bistrița river in western Moldavia, was by the end of the nineteenth century almost half Jewish, and Jews held the great majority of its businesses. In 1882 founders of Rosh Pinna and Zikhron Ya’akov set out from here; Aaron Aaronsohn and Rabbi Alexandre Safran were born here; and in the summer of 1944 the Jewish community briefly ran the affairs of the whole town. Today a community of at most two hundred people remains.

A Gravestone of 1703 and a Register of 1774

The earliest evidence of the Jews of Bacău is a gravestone. In the twentieth century the historian Itzhak Kara recorded, in the old cemetery, the stone of “Aaron son of Joseph”, dated 5464 (1703); after the Second World War it was moved to the Museum of the History of Romanian Jews in Bucharest. Kara himself thought it was not the oldest grave but a sign that a real community already lived here in the early eighteenth century. In 1742 the ruler Constantin Mavrocordat ordered his officials to help two Jews, Avram and Boroh, settle in the town.

The register of the Bacău hevra kadisha survives, and according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica the society was founded in 1774; the earliest entry dates from that year, although the title page gives 5531 (1770/71). The census of 1772–1774 recorded five Jewish merchants in the town, and the tax roll of 1803 already listed 58 Jewish taxpayers, some 230–250 people by Kara’s estimate. For 1820 the Encyclopaedia counts 55 Jewish heads of family paying tax.

Rabbis, Hasidim and Institutions

The first half of the nineteenth century belongs to Rabbi Isaac of Botoșani (“Itzik Botoșaner”), rabbi of the town from 1803 to 1858, whom the Encyclopaedia describes as a wonder-worker. At the same time, according to Kara, Rabbi “Rahmune” Derbaremdiker spread Hasidism in the town, and a Chabad synagogue was founded in 1841. These years saw the founding of a Talmud Torah (1828, per the Encyclopaedia), the Po’alei Zedek tailors’ society (1832), a Gemilut Hasadim society (1836) and a Mishnah society (1851). The “Rabbi Israel” synagogue on Lecca Street, the town’s Jewish street, was a Hasidic centre, according to the Encyclopaedia.

Two rabbis who arrived in the early twentieth century left their mark. Rabbi Bezalel Ze’ev Safran served in Bacău from 1905 until his death (1930 per the Encyclopaedia, 1929 per Kara), and his remains were later reinterred in the Land of Israel. His son, Alexandre Safran, was born in Bacău in 1910, served as the town’s rabbi from 1934 according to Kara, and in 1940, aged 29, was elected Chief Rabbi of Romania. During the war he lobbied the authorities against deportations; in 1948 he moved to Switzerland, where he was Chief Rabbi of Geneva until his death in 2006.

A Town of Merchants and Craftsmen

Within a century Bacău became half Jewish. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica it had 3,810 Jews in 1859 and 7,902 in 1899, 48.3% of the population (Kara gives 7,850 out of 16,378 for the same year). In 1899 Jews owned 563 of the town’s commercial enterprises, 85.6%, and in 1901 two thirds of its craftsmen were Jewish. Kara lists dozens of trades — tailors and shoemakers, carters and masons — and each of these guilds had a synagogue of its own.

Jews also built the local industry. The Brill brothers founded the first tanneries, and Samuel Filderman’s leather works, founded in 1876, was according to Kara the only factory in Romania that supplied the army with leather goods and soles during the First World War. Faivis Klein, whom Kara calls the largest iron merchant in Moldavia, supplied rails for the railway and in 1894 built bathhouses for the poor at his own expense; the Jewish boys’ school bore his name. In 1882 Margulies brought a printing press with Latin and Hebrew type to the town, and Bacău became a centre of Hebrew and Yiddish printing: A. L. Löbel’s Jewish newspaper appeared here from 1876, and in 1882 the folk singer Lipa Rudich published his song collection Kol Rina.

Prosperity did not protect against persecution. The Encyclopaedia describes post-1866 Bacău as a centre of anti-Jewish agitation. In the spring of 1868, according to Kara, the mayor expelled Jewish families from the county’s villages, and the National Guard closed synagogues and damaged the cemetery. In 1900–1901 some 400 Jews left Bacău on foot with the “Fusgeyer” groups, bound for Hamburg and from there for America.

From Bacău to Rosh Pinna and Zikhron Ya’akov

In 1881 a society for the “Colonisation of the Land of Israel” was founded in Bacău, and the town sent delegates to the Zionist conference in Focșani. In 1882 families from Bacău, together with settlers from the neighbouring town of Moinești, left for the Land of Israel. According to Kara, three men from Bacău were among the founders of Rosh Pinna and eight among the founders of Zikhron Ya’akov. One of them was Ephraim Fishel Aaronsohn; his son Aaron, born in Bacău in 1876 and later the discoverer of wild emmer wheat and founder of NILI, arrived in the country at the age of six. In 1892 the town’s Hovevei Zion society had about a hundred members, and in 1927 Bacău hosted the 16th Congress of the Zionists of Romania.

The War Years

In 1930 Bacău had 9,593 Jews, 30.8% of the population, with 25 synagogues, a hospital, an orphanage and an old-age home. In the citizenship review of 1938 some two thousand of the town’s Jews lost their citizenship. In the autumn of 1940, under the Legionary regime, the municipality seized part of the new cemetery and ploughed it for farming, and in early 1941 more than 1,200 Jewish-owned buildings were expropriated.

With the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, some 4,000–5,000 Jews from Târgu Ocna, Moinești and the county’s villages were driven into Bacău. According to the Encyclopaedia the town’s Jewish population rose to about 12,000; Kara gives 13,038 registered Jews in 1942. Community leaders were held hostage in the “Rabbi Israel” and Grain Merchants’ synagogues until 1942. Some 2,500 men were sent to forced labour — in Transylvania and Bessarabia, per the Encyclopaedia — and the community kitchen served hundreds of meals a day. Natives of Bacău were among those who died in the sinking of the Struma in 1942 and of the Mefküre in 1944. In the spring of 1944 Jews were made to dig defensive trenches, and in the summer, when the town officials fled before the Red Army, the Jewish community, according to the Encyclopaedia, kept public order, ran the municipal hospital and buried the town’s dead.

After the War and Today

After the war the Jewish population of Bacău peaked at about 18,000, as refugees from all over Moldavia gathered in the town. Most later emigrated to Israel. The town’s last rabbi, M. Marilus, served until 1961. In 2004, 359 Jews remained; in 2013 the community had about 170 members, and in 2016 fewer than two hundred, most of them elderly. Among the town’s natives Kara mentions the mathematician Solomon Marcus, born in Bacău in 1925 and a member of the Romanian Academy.

In November 2024 the Grain Merchants’ (Cerealiștilor) Synagogue, the only one of the old synagogues to survive intact, was rededicated after renovation, in the presence of Israel’s ambassador to Romania and Romania’s Chief Rabbi, Rafael Shaffer. A second synagogue, named after Rabbi Avram Arie Rosen, is listed as active by the Federation. Two Jewish cemeteries survive: the old one, from the early eighteenth century, and the new one, opened in 1917. In March 2025 Nazi symbols were daubed on several gravestones, and Bacău police detained an 18-year-old suspect.

Visiting

The community office is at Strada Erou C.M. Hasan 2A, tel. +40 234 534 714, per the Federation’s website; the community’s president is Hainrich Brif. No regular opening hours are published, and visits to the synagogue and cemeteries must be arranged in advance. What to see:

• The Grain Merchants’ Synagogue at Strada Ștefan cel Mare 35, with its murals of 1926–1927
• The Rabbi Rosen synagogue, the community’s active house of prayer
• The old cemetery on Strada Ghioceilor, one of the oldest in Moldavia
• The new cemetery at Strada Alexei Tolstoi 16, with thousands of stones

For the synagogues and cemeteries, see our story on the synagogues of Bacău. A visit combines well with nearby Roman and Piatra Neamț.