The Jews of Buzău: a Synagogue on the Brink

Buzău, a Wallachian county town about 110 kilometres north-east of Bucharest, is one of the old Jewish footholds of the Romanian Old Kingdom: as early as the 17th century the Jews of Ploiești buried their dead here. In 1899 Jews made up 7.6% of the town. The great synagogue of the early 20th century still stands on Strada Alexandru Marghiloman, but no one has prayed in it since the earthquake of 1977, and it is close to collapse.

From an old burial ground to an organized community

The earliest evidence of a Jewish presence in Buzău comes from the neighbouring town: according to Yad Vashem’s Pinkas HaKehillot, the Jews of Ploiești, who settled there in the second half of the 17th century, at first buried their dead “in the cemetery of the nearby village of Buzău”. The synagogue inventory of the Jewish Romania website mentions a synagogue in the Sârbărie quarter that may have existed as early as 1765, and one in the well-known inn of Polcovnic Nuță in 1812. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, only three Jewish families lived in the town in 1831, and a community was organized in the 1830s; the local historian Valeriu Nicolescu gives the year 1830 and adds that the community was reorganized in 1855.

That year the community bought a plot on Strada Dobrogei — today Strada Alexandru Marghiloman — where a synagogue, a school and a bathhouse, completed in 1890, were built over the years. According to Nicolescu, the 1868 census counted 174 Jews, mostly craftsmen and traders. Growth at the end of the century was rapid: according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, in 1899 Buzău had 1,660 Jews, 7.6% of the population. Besides the great synagogue, the Jewish Romania inventory lists a tailors’ synagogue (1890) and an Agudat Israel prayer group in a private house (1880–1920).

The school on Strada Marghiloman

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, a Jewish school opened in the town in 1873. According to the Buzău town hall’s heritage website, a school building, a kindergarten and a director’s house were built in 1893 and 1897 at Strada Marghiloman 27 (formerly Dobrogei 25); a gymnasium was founded around 1912, and a new kindergarten was built in 1927. Between 1918 and 1940 about a hundred pupils a year studied there, in Romanian, with Hebrew and religion alongside the general curriculum. According to the town hall, community members donated to the “Sion” ambulance in the War of Independence of 1877–1878, served in the Second Balkan War (1913) and the First World War, and in 1916–1919 the school building served as a military hospital. Today it houses the town’s social assistance department.

The synagogue: a temple on the verge of collapse

According to the town hall’s website, the first synagogue on Strada Marghiloman was built in 1885 on a plot bought by Bercu Haim and Iancu Bercovici; it proved too small and was demolished, and the community bought a neighbouring plot. The date of the building that replaced it is disputed: according to Nicolescu, as quoted by Adevărul, the temple was built in 1910–1912 under a founding act of 24 May 1909 and partly inaugurated in 1910, when H. Korn was community president; the Agerpres news agency gives 1907–1910; the town hall adds that the building was rebuilt in 1928. The national list of historic monuments (BZ-II-m-B-02339) dates it to “the 19th century”, and the Federation’s list gives 1855, the year the land was bought. The Jewish Romania inventory credits the “Great Synagogue” of 1910 with four hundred seats.

The building, in an “oriental” style according to Agerpres, stands behind the former school. It was badly damaged in the 1977 earthquake and has not been used for prayer since, for fear that the arches will collapse; services moved to a smaller renovated building in the same courtyard. Deep cracks run through the walls, the great bronze chandelier was stolen and sold for scrap, and the furniture has disappeared. In 2023 the community head, Max Weiner, described it as “in a state of pre-collapse” and proposed turning it into a museum; Mayor Constantin Toma proposed cooperation on a restoration modelled on the Sion synagogue in Oradea in 2023 and again in 2025, but no approved project has been announced. In March 2025 the Israeli ambassador, Lior Ben Dor, visited the site.

1940–1944: forced labour and hostages

Buzău, in the heart of the Old Kingdom, saw no mass deportation, but its Jews were hard hit by anti-Jewish policy. In 1930 the community numbered 1,604, 4.5% of the population, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, and according to the town hall about 1,100 Jews lived in the town in 1940. The town hall lists among the blows to the community’s institutions the 1940 earthquake, vandalism by the Legionaries, and requisitions and expropriations under the Antonescu regime. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the town’s Jews were sent to forced labour in December 1940, and in July 1941 the men aged 18–60 were arrested and held until the end of the year. According to Adevărul, in 1941 Jews were barred from the streets between 8 p.m. and 7 a.m., and in 1942 a county commission was set up to administer the property expropriated from them.

Buzău also received Jews expelled from other Romanian towns, and the community helped them. The most striking episode: in April 1944, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 900 Jewish orphans from Transnistria arrived in the town and were cared for by the community.

After the war and today

Emigration to Israel emptied the community: according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica it had 274 members in 1956, about thirty families with a rabbi and a shochet in 1970, and 22 Jews in 2002. Later press reports speak of about fifty members (Adevărul 2018, Agerpres 2023), and Adevărul in 2016 of twenty at most. The Federation’s contacts page lists no separate community in Buzău: it is affiliated, together with Râmnicu Sărat, to the Focșani community, and the person responsible for it is Bernard Weiner.

The cemeteries

According to Nicolescu, the Jewish cemetery was founded in 1853 on the edge of the Poșta district; in 1896 the mayor asked for it to be moved, and a deed of sale for a new plot was signed. The JewishGen Cemetery Discovery Project survey of 2001 records two sites: a small old cemetery (about thirty by thirty metres) from the 19th century, last used for a burial in 1940 and vandalized during the war; and the large cemetery on the road to Urziceni, which according to the survey came into use in 1940. The large cemetery has a tahara house, an ohel, a Holocaust memorial, a memorial to Jewish soldiers and stones inscribed in Hebrew, Yiddish and Romanian. According to Adevărul (2016), graves were desecrated by the Iron Guard and the German army in the 1940s; in 2016 the town council allowed the community to sell about half the site, which held no graves, to fund the upkeep of the rest. In 2023 Agerpres described the cemetery and its chapel as badly neglected.

Visiting

• Synagogue: Strada Alexandru Marghiloman 29, per the list of historic monuments and the Federation’s list. The building is at risk of collapse and is not open to visitors; it can be seen from outside. No opening hours are published.
• Former Jewish school: Strada Marghiloman 27, per the town hall’s website; today the municipal social assistance department.
• Cemetery: locked gate; visits by arrangement.
• Arrangements: Jewish Community of Focșani, to which Buzău is affiliated, tel. +40 237 623 959 per the Federation’s website.
• Nearby: Ploiești, Brăila and Focșani.