The Jews of Botoșani: Half the Town, a Ruzhin Court and the War

At the end of the 19th century Jews made up more than half of Botoșani’s population, and three out of four merchants in the town were Jewish. It was the second-largest community in Moldavia after Iași. In the Second World War the community endured forced labour, hostage-taking and the deportation of 148 of its members to Transnistria, and in 1947 it numbered almost twenty thousand. Today about thirty Jews remain.

Beginnings: tombstones, privileges and violence

According to Yad Vashem’s Pinkas HaKehillot, tombstones from 1540 were found in the old cemetery, and a Hebrew book printed in Lublin in 1615 mentions the “congregation of Botoșani”. The Encyclopaedia Judaica is more cautious and places the community’s beginnings in the 17th century. In 1745 Prince Ioan Nicolae Mavrocordat gave merchants, Jews among them, the right to own their houses, and in 1754 Prince Matei Ghica confirmed these privileges. In 1799 the community received the status of an autonomous corporation from Prince Alexander Ypsilanti, and in 1803 350 Jewish families paid taxes in the town.

Privileges came with persecution. During the Russo-Turkish war of 1768–1774 Ottoman soldiers attacked the Jewish quarter and murdered the town’s rabbi, and in 1783 a blood libel was raised against the Jews. In 1817 Prince Calimachi settled a dispute over the expansion of the cemetery in the community’s favour. In the early 19th century Botoșani’s Jewish merchants traded with Leipzig and Brody.

Half the town

Immigration from Galicia and Russia made the community grow fast: 1,400 people in 1800, 9,880 in 1838 and 13,123 in 1859. In the 1899 census Jews were about half the population. The Pinkas gives 14,817 (51%), the Encyclopaedia Judaica 16,817 (51.8%). More than three quarters of the merchants and about 68% of the artisans were Jews. The 1832 census already listed 98 Jewish tailors, 29 shoemakers, 22 butchers and 15 goldsmiths. The town had a Hebrew press run by Azriel Grinberg, known for its prayer books and calendars.

The town’s modern Jewish school was founded in 1865 or 1866 by Hillel Kahana and ran until the Second World War, partly supported by the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Hebrew writers taught there, among them David Isaiah Silberbusch and Zevi Lazar Teller, who in 1882 published in Botoșani the first two issues of the Hebrew monthly Ha-Or. A Jewish hospital grew out of a hekdesh founded in 1817, an old people’s home opened in 1908, and a girls’ school in 1896.

Rabbis, Hasidim and notable natives

Among the town’s rabbis the Pinkas lists Rabbi Hayyim Tyrer, known as Hayyim of Czernowitz, author of Be’er Mayim Hayyim, who settled in the Land of Israel and died there in 1813. The Jewish Encyclopedia does not name Botoșani among his communities. In 1889 a long “rabbinical rift” split the community, lasting until 1921, when Rabbi Dov Burstein was chosen as rabbi of the whole town. Burstein headed the rabbinical court through the war years and emigrated to Israel in 1950. In the town itself a Hasidic court was led by Rabbi Moshe Moscovici and, from 1929, by Rabbi Chanoch Zilberfarb.

Not far from Botoșani, in the county town of Ștefănești, stood one of the best-known Hasidic courts in Romanian Jewry. Its founder, Rabbi Menahem Nahum Friedman, was the third son of Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin and settled in Ștefănești after his father’s death in 1850. His only son, Rabbi Abraham Mattathias, led the Hasidim for decades until his death, childless, in 1933. With his death, writes the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the Ștefănești dynasty came to an end. In 1886 Jews were 76.5% of Ștefănești’s population; in the war its Jews were deported to Botoșani.

Botoșani produced several prominent Jewish intellectuals in Romania. Henric Sanielevici, born in 1875 and a grandson on his mother’s side of the town’s rabbi, was a literary critic and essayist, a co-founder of the Poporanist movement and editor of the review Curentul Nou. Like most Romanian Jews of his generation, he received citizenship only in 1910. The Pinkas also lists among the town’s natives the poet Enric Furtună (born 1881) and the poet Adrian Verea. The painter Reuven Rubin, sometimes associated with Moldavia, was born in Galați, not in Botoșani.

From 1907 to the war

The community suffered riots in 1879 and again in the peasant revolt of 1907. According to the Pinkas, on 4–5 March 1907 some 1,500 peasants broke into the town: two Jews were killed, 1,614 families were affected and twenty synagogues were looted. After the emancipation of 1918–1919, 9,380 of the town’s Jews received equal rights. Zionism grew strong here between the wars. Rabbi Leibush Mendel Landau had founded a Zionist society as early as 1895, and in parliamentary elections the Zionists won about 90% of the Jewish vote in the county. In 1930 Botoșani had 11,840 Jews, 36.6% of the population.

The Second World War

Botoșani lay in the Old Kingdom (the Regat), and its Jews were not caught up in the mass deportations to Transnistria, but they lived through years of harsh persecution. Under the National Legionary State in the autumn of 1940 the Iron Guard’s “green house” was used for torture, and Jewish property was looted. From December 1940 men aged 15 to 70 were drafted for forced labour. Some 8,000 of the town’s Jews were put to forced labour, about half of them far from home, in Bessarabia, Transnistria, Dobruja and the Iași area.

On 26 June 1941, days after the invasion of the Soviet Union and in the same days as the Iași pogrom, twenty Jews, mostly rabbis and ritual slaughterers, were taken hostage; by July there were 50–60. On 14 August 1941 the military command ordered Jews to wear the yellow badge, although the Interior Ministry had cancelled the order on 3 July. Some 11,000 Jews from the surrounding small towns and villages, including 1,547 from Ștefănești and 1,091 from Sulița, were driven into Botoșani and depended on the community. The community opened Jewish schools for pupils expelled from state schools, and the number of people it supported rose from 2,450 in 1940 to 7,228 in 1942.

On 8 September 1942, 42 Jews suspected of communism were deported to Transnistria. Some were sent to the Vapniarka camp and the rest to the Mostovoi ghetto, where, according to the Pinkas, they were shot on Yom Kippur. In all, 148 Jews were deported from Botoșani. In the spring of 1944, 186 orphans from Transnistria arrived in the town. In March 1944 the Romanian administration left, and German soldiers forced Jews to dig anti-tank ditches. In the days before the Red Army entered, on 4 April 1944 according to the Pinkas (another source gives 7 April), the community set up a civil guard and ran the hospital.

After the war and today

In 1947 Botoșani had 19,550 Jews: local residents, survivors returning from Transnistria and refugees from northern Bukovina and Bessarabia. Within a few years most emigrated to Israel. In 1969, 500 families and four synagogues remained, and in 2004 the town had 125 Jews. In October 2024 the community’s president, Fredi Goldenberg, said about thirty were left. JewishGen’s cemetery survey records three Jewish cemeteries in the town. The largest, about 800 by 250 metres, has more than 5,000 visible gravestones and a purification house.

Visiting

The community office is at Strada 1 Decembrie 54, tel. +40 742 267 384, per the Federation of Jewish Communities’ website. Visits to the Great Synagogue and the cemeteries are by prior arrangement. According to the community, the synagogue opens one day a week and the cemetery on another, with the days announced on the community’s Facebook page. The synagogue and its murals have their own story. From Botoșani you can stop at Ștefănești, and Iași and Suceava are close by.