The Jews of Bârlad: The Market Town and the Walkers

Bârlad — Berlad in Yiddish — is an old market town in southern Moldavia, on the Bârlad river, on the road between Iași and Galați. At the end of the 19th century Jews made up about a quarter of its population, and in the spring of 1900 one of the first groups of “walkers” — the fusgeyers — set out from here, heralding the mass emigration of Romanian Jewry. The Great Synagogue, which the Federation’s list dates to 1789, is still listed as an active synagogue.

Beginnings

According to Yad Vashem’s Pinkas HaKehillot, gravestones in the old cemetery in the town centre point to Jewish settlement as early as the first half of the 17th century. Written records begin in 1738: the Encyclopaedia Judaica relates that in that year the Prince of Moldavia appointed one Marco (Mordechai) head of the community, and the Pinkas mentions a starosta who led the Jewish guild. A Romanian certificate of 1769 already refers to Jewish merchants and a “Street of the Jewish Storekeepers”.

The figures show rapid growth: 120 Jews in 1803, 401 in 1831, 2,001 in 1859 (17.9% of the population) and 5,883 in 1899 — 24.2% of the town. Bârlad was a wheat market for the neighbouring counties; according to the Pinkas, in 1887 Jews were 389 of the town’s 954 merchants, and Jews built the county’s large flour mill.

Persecution and the walkers

Growth came with waves of persecution. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, in 1838 twenty-three community notables were jailed over a libel and released only after paying a heavy fine. In December 1867 riots broke out after Jews were accused of murdering a clergyman; a year later there was another riot, and in 1870 the French consul protested against the persecution of the Jews. In the 1880s and 1890s, as laws pushed Jews out of economic life, emigration from the town began.

Between 1899 and 1902, according to the Pinkas, some six hundred Jews left Bârlad. This is where the “emigration on foot” movement was born: young people formed groups, walked to the ports of Europe and on to America, and published their own newsletters. In the spring of 1900 two organised groups left the town. The YIVO archives identify “the Wayfarers of Barlad” as the first group of Romanian fusgeyers, and according to JTA the group’s leader, Jacob Finkelstein, wrote a memoir preserved at YIVO. Their example was followed by hundreds of similar groups across Romania.

In 1907 teachers and priests incited the gymnasium pupils, who attacked the Jewish quarter; according to the Pinkas, eighty Jewish-owned shops were damaged.

Rabbis, institutions and Zionism

The leading figure in the community’s history is Rabbi Isaac Taubes (1834–1920), grandson of Rabbi Aaron Moses Taubes of Iași and son of Rabbi Michael Taubes of Vaslui. According to the Pinkas, Prince Alexandru Ioan Cuza recognised him as rabbi of Bârlad in 1862, and he is considered the first rabbi in Romania to preach in Romanian. Taubes fought for Jewish rights and against the “Jewish oath”, published tracts against the persecutions that were translated by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, worked to found secular schools in Bârlad and nearby towns, and translated poems by Vasile Alecsandri into Hebrew.

A modern Jewish school was founded in 1873, and in 1910 some 470 pupils attended the community’s boys’ and girls’ schools. The Jewish hospital reopened in 1891, when the municipal hospital stopped admitting Jewish patients, and a new building went up in 1899. The town was an early Zionist centre: a “Yishuv Eretz Israel” branch was founded in 1881, a Hovevei Zion society named after Max Nordau in 1897, and from 1913 to 1919 the Zionist monthly Bar Kochba appeared here. The Zionist student club founded in 1910 produced Michael Landau, later a member of the Romanian parliament.

On the eve of the Second World War, according to the Pinkas, the town had eight synagogues and prayer houses. Bârlad also produced writers and scientists: according to ANU – Museum of the Jewish People, the poet and translator Avram Axelrad (born 1879), the electrical engineer Martin Bercovici, a member of the Romanian Academy, and the novelist Virgil Duda, who emigrated to Israel in 1988, were all born here.

The Second World War

In November 1940, under the National Legionary State, Jewish men were taken for forced labour; according to the Pinkas, academics were released after their Romanian colleagues protested. That same month four Jewish students were arrested for alleged communist propaganda, tortured in Vaslui and acquitted at a trial in Galați.

When war with the Soviet Union began in June 1941, the authorities concentrated in Bârlad the Jews of the county’s villages and small towns — among them Plopana, Murgeni, Avrămești and Rădeni, and some of the Jews of Berești and Fălciu. In 1942 there were 3,224 Jews in the town. After Jewish pupils were expelled from state schools the community ran its own gymnasium, and the number of families depending on its support rose from 200 in 1940 to about 600 in 1942–1943. The community sent clothes and medicine to men in forced-labour camps, among them Stoisești, Turcoaia and Alexandreni in Bessarabia. In the spring of 1943 the “National Centre for Romanisation” confiscated the community’s hospital, old people’s home and bath-house. Four Jews suspected of communism were sent to the Vapniarka camp in Transnistria and later returned.

When orphaned children were brought back from Transnistria, Bârlad took in 167 of them, set up a hostel and cared for them until they emigrated to the Land of Israel. According to the Pinkas, as German forces retreated in 1944 their commander, General Wöhler, proposed exterminating the town’s Jews, and the plan was prevented by setbacks at the front. The sources we checked do not describe a general deportation of the Jews of Bârlad itself to Transnistria.

After the war and today

After the war communal life resumed, and in 1947 there were 3,100 Jews in the town. In 1949 the former police chief Ion Hagiu was sentenced to three years in prison for persecuting Jews. Emigration, mainly to Israel, quickly reduced the community: according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, about a hundred families and one synagogue remained in 1969, and 46 Jews in 2004.

The Jewish Community of Bârlad is still listed by the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, with its office at Strada Sf. Ilie 5. The Great Synagogue (the “Temple”) is listed at the same address; the Federation dates it to 1789 and marks it as active. In 2012 the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University documented the synagogue, including the paintings of the Tribes of Israel in the main prayer hall.

The cemeteries

According to the Pinkas, on the eve of the war the community had three cemeteries, two of them old; one was destroyed by the Russian army in the First World War and restored in 1926. A 2000 survey for JewishGen’s Cemetery Discovery Project describes two old 19th-century cemeteries, closed and damaged, and a newer cemetery on the road to Tecuci whose oldest gravestone dates from 1903. According to the survey, this cemetery has a Holocaust memorial, a memorial to Jewish soldiers and a purification house.

Visiting

• The Great Synagogue: Strada Sf. Ilie 5, according to the Federation’s list. No opening hours have been published; arrange your visit in advance.
• Arrangements: Jewish Community of Bârlad, at the same address; tel. +40 235 412 001 per the Federation’s website.
• The cemeteries: access only by arrangement with the community.
• Nearby: Vaslui, about 45 km to the north; Huși; Galați.