The Jews of Turnu Severin: Sephardim and Ashkenazim in a Danube Port

Drobeta-Turnu Severin, a Danube port in western Oltenia, was refounded in 1833, and over the 19th century it grew a Jewish community of two rites: Sephardim from the Balkan cities and Ashkenazim from Romania and Austria-Hungary. What remains is an 1881 synagogue that became a notary’s office, and a cemetery divided into Sephardic and Ashkenazi sections, with a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.

A new town on the Danube

Modern Severin was laid out in the 1830s beside the remains of Roman Drobeta, as a Wallachian port on the Danube. According to a 2013 investigation by the newspaper Adevărul, about 12 Jewish families were already living in nearby Cerneți, the old county seat, before the town was founded, with no religious organisation and no school. An earlier article in the same paper, from 2009, counts about 15 Jews in Severin at its founding in 1833.

As the port grew, Adevărul writes, many Sephardic Jews arrived from the Balkan cities, alongside Ashkenazi Jews from other parts of Romania and from Austria-Hungary. According to the paper, the community’s religious institutions were founded only after the war of 1877–1878, when naturalisation opened up for Jews in Romania.

Two rites, two communities

Severin’s Sephardim and Ashkenazim stayed separate even after the synagogue was built. Adevărul cites a community census whose year it does not give: the Sephardic community had 64 families, comprising 64 men, 78 women (including widows), 40 girls and 17 children; the Ashkenazi community had 82 tax-paying members and 176 people in all.

The 1899 census counted 815 Jews in the town, according to Adevărul and the JewishGen cemetery survey. Most were in trade, and the community left its mark on the townscape: the building that now houses the town’s Art Museum was built, according to the Pro-Mehedinți association, by the Sabetay family, which Adevărul identifies as Jewish.

The 1881 synagogue

On 7 June 1881 the German-rite (Ashkenazi) community, represented by Ignat Sorunger and Iacob Weiss, applied for permission to build a synagogue on plot no. 217 in the town centre, according to the documents cited by Adevărul. The building has a neo-Gothic façade with a neo-Romanesque frieze of triple windows. Inside are a three-aisled basilica-plan hall, a coffered neo-Renaissance ceiling and a semicircular apse for the Torah ark.

According to the same article, the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania sold the building to a private family some years before 2013, and it has since housed a notary’s and law office. The 2009 article instead says it was the Sephardic synagogue that became a notary’s office, and the 2010 survey by the US Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad lists two former synagogue buildings still standing in the town. We found no source that settles which of the two is the notary’s office, and neither building appears on the Federation’s list of synagogues.

Decline and the war years

After 1900 the numbers began to fall. Adevărul gives 531 Jews in 1929, while the JewishGen survey gives 388 in the 1930 census. The sources do not explain the gap.

During the Second World War Severin remained within the Old Kingdom of Romania (the Regat). Its Jews were not sent to ghettos or to Auschwitz, but they were subject to the antisemitic legislation of the Antonescu regime. According to the final report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania (the Wiesel Commission), “Romanianization” began with the expropriation of Jewish property, 84,042 Jews aged 18 to 50 were registered for forced labour, and the plan to deport the Jews of the Regat and southern Transylvania to the Bełżec death camp, which the regime agreed to in summer 1942, was never carried out. Adevărul describes the war years in Severin as a time of camps, forced labour and humiliation.

After the war

After the war most of the Jews left, the majority for Israel. According to Adevărul, 58 Jews remained in 1966 and only two in 2009; one of them, 86-year-old Iosif Lazăr, looked after the cemetery. Mehedinți County statistics cited by the paper in 2013 counted about 11 Jews in the whole county, and the community has not been officially registered since 1996. According to the Federation’s cemetery list, Severin now belongs to the Jewish Community of Craiova.

The cemetery

The Jewish cemetery was established in the second half of the 19th century. According to the 2001 JewishGen survey, its oldest known stone dates from 1870 and the last known burial was in 1989. It measures about 220 by 70 metres and holds between 100 and 500 stones with inscriptions in Hebrew, German, Romanian and Hungarian. Adevărul describes it as divided into Sephardic and Ashkenazi sections, separated by a large stone gateway bearing a Star of David. According to the paper, it contains a memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, distinctive funerary monuments and black marble stones from the early 20th century.

The site is in poor condition. The 2001 survey already recorded frequent vandalism and many broken or toppled stones, and in 2013 Adevărul reported stones torn out by scrap-metal thieves and fences gone. The town hall said at the time that it could not clean the site, because doing so might be taken as an infringement of property rights.

Visiting

• Jewish cemetery: on the Federation’s 2007 cemetery list, with no address. Check the location and access in advance.
• Former synagogue: the 1881 building is a private office and can be seen from the outside only. It is not on the Federation’s synagogue list, so confirm its location with the community.
• Arrangements: Jewish Community of Craiova, Strada Horezului 5, according to the Federation. No hours are published.
• Nearby: Orșova and its cemetery, up the Danube; Craiova; Caransebeș.