The Jews of Darabani: A Northern Moldavian Town and the Deportation to Transnistria

Darabani, a small town in northern Moldavia on the road between Bukovina and Moldavia, was in the 19th century a town of trade and crafts in which roughly a third of the inhabitants were Jews — not a majority, but a dense community of synagogues, hadarim and Hasidim. In 1941 its Jews were driven out twice: in June to camps in southern Romania, and in November to Transnistria, where most of them died. No Jews live in Darabani today; what remains are the cemeteries on the edge of town.

A town on the trade road

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Jews from Galicia settled in Darabani in 1836, followed by Jews from Russia; the town’s position on the trade route between Bukovina and Moldavia attracted further settlers. The Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania (INSHR) notes that the settlement is documented from the late 1830s, and that the community had its own cemetery from the start. As early as 1838 some 600 Jews lived there, and in 1859 there were 638, about 38 per cent of the population. The peak came in 1899, with 2,472 Jews; in 1910 there were 2,387 (36.8 per cent), and by 1930 the number had fallen to 1,917 (17.8 per cent). In other words, Darabani was never a Jewish-majority town like its neighbours Dorohoi and Ștefănești, but its Jews were a large and conspicuous minority.

Most Jews were merchants and artisans. The Institute lists tailors, shoemakers, furriers, carpenters, butchers, carters and porters. Relations with their surroundings were not calm: according to the Judaica, the estate owner sued the Jews in 1875 and 1877, and the lawsuits were accompanied by violence, and in 1907 anti-Jewish riots broke out again.

Synagogues, hadarim and the Hasidim of Ștefănești

The community was divided from the beginning. According to the Judaica, the Russian Jews built a synagogue of their own as early as the 1840s, and between the wars there was friction between artisans and merchants. In 1883, according to the Institute, Darabani had 20 hadarim, a talmud torah and six synagogues, among them the Great Synagogue, rebuilt after a fire in 1876, the “Russian” synagogue of the 1840s, the tailors’ synagogue (1853, rebuilt in 1880) and the carters’ synagogue. The mikveh opened in 1853 and was rebuilt in 1879. In 1935–1940 the town had eight synagogues and five hadarim, and in 1937 the community opened its own school.

Many of Darabani’s Jews, writes the Judaica, were Hasidim of the Rebbe of Ștefănești, the Ruzhin court in a nearby town. The town’s rabbi from 1908 to 1930 was Rabbi Nahum Shemaryahu Schechter, who wrote several volumes of sermons and works on Hebrew and Jewish names, and died in Jerusalem. In the 1930s a Zionist organisation was founded, and a branch of the Zionist-leaning Jewish Party (Partidul Evreiesc) won seats on the town council. Darabani was the birthplace of the poet Shimon Haran, who wrote in Hebrew and Romanian and died in Jerusalem in 2004, and of the poet Sami Weinstein-Boiangiu (A. Ebion), who wrote in Yiddish and Romanian.

1940–1941: from persecution to the first expulsion

The disaster began in June 1940, when the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina and the new border ran close to the town. According to the Judaica, army units and police attacked Jews almost daily, searched their homes and arrested them, claiming they supported the Soviets and were secretly preparing to welcome the Red Army. According to the Institute, the local police commander, Nicolae Dimitriu, on his own initiative forbade Jews to go out into the streets. On 20 December 1940, under the “National Legionary State”, the local Legionary organisation drew up a plan to demolish 25 buildings, a synagogue among them, on the grounds that their latrines were too close to the church. From September 1940 to the autumn of 1941 Jews lost their trading licences, were expelled from the army and from schools, sent to forced labour and had their property confiscated.

On 19 June 1941, days before Romania and Germany invaded the Soviet Union, all of Darabani’s Jews were removed — about 2,000 people according to the Institute; the Judaica gives 1,854 Jews in the town that year. They were given half an hour to leave and could take only essentials; their homes were looted. They walked some 35 kilometres to the railway station — Vorniceni, according to the Institute — and were taken in freight cars to Dorohoi and on to the south of the country: the men to the Târgu Jiu camp, the women and children to Turnu Severin in Oltenia. According to the Pinkas HaKehillot entry for Dorohoi, the Jews of Săveni, Mihăileni and Rădăuți-Prut were also sent to that town in those days, placing a heavy burden on its community. About three months later the expellees were brought back to Dorohoi.

November 1941: to Transnistria

Darabani then belonged to Dorohoi county, part of the “Old Kingdom” (the Regat), whose Jews were generally not deported. But according to the Pinkas HaKehillot, Dorohoi county was attached administratively to Bukovina in 1938 and returned to Moldavia only in 1944, and so it was included in the deportation of Bukovina’s Jews. On 7 November 1941 the first transport of the Jews of Darabani and Rădăuți-Prut left Dorohoi for Transnistria; the next day the Jews of Săveni and Mihăileni were also brought to the station. According to the Institute, before boarding they were searched by representatives of the National Bank. They travelled in sealed freight cars and continued on foot from the railhead. In Transnistria they were held in ghettos for about two and a half years, and most died of hunger, cold and disease.

At the end of December 1943 the deportees of Dorohoi county were allowed to return — the first of the Transnistria deportees to be granted this. According to the Pinkas, by the end of that month 6,053 of the 10,368 deportees from the whole county had come back; we do not know how many returned to Darabani itself, and the Institute says only that a “minority” survived. Even after their return, writes the Judaica, restrictions continued: they were not allowed to trade, to walk in the streets or to buy food before ten in the morning, and Romanians were forbidden any contact with them.

After the war and today

In 1947 there were 990 Jews in Darabani according to the Judaica (997 according to the Institute), and in 1950 five synagogues were still in use. Emigration, mainly to Israel, emptied the town: by 1970 about ten families remained, keeping the synagogue open. According to the Institute, the last Jew of Darabani died in 1984. Former residents organised in Israel within the association of Jews from the former Dorohoi county.

We know of no synagogue still standing in the town; a visitor from Israel who came in 2004 wrote that to the best of his knowledge there were no longer any Jews or a synagogue. The 2000 survey of the JewishGen Cemetery Discovery Project recorded two Jewish cemeteries in Darabani, each with hundreds of gravestones. In the older one most stones are broken or toppled; in the second, larger one (about 150 by 75 metres), between half and three quarters of the stones were broken or fallen. Access to both is difficult in the growing season. The 2004 visitor described a cemetery outside the town, reached across fields and surrounded by a wire fence, parts of it well kept.

Visiting

• The cemeteries — on the edge of town. No visiting hours are published, and the addresses in the 2000 survey have not been confirmed by a current official source; do not go without arranging the visit in advance.
• Arranging a visit — there is no community in Darabani. The nearest is the Jewish Community of Dorohoi, per the Federation’s website: Strada Spiru Haret 95, tel. +40 231 611 797. You can also contact the Botoșani community (Strada 1 Decembrie 54, tel. +40 742 267 384) or the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania.

The visit combines well with Dorohoi, which has a working synagogue and a cemetery with memorials to the victims of the pogrom and the deportation, and with Botoșani and Ștefănești.