The Jews of Giurgiu: Sephardim and Ashkenazim in a Danube Port

Giurgiu, Wallachia’s port on the Danube, was home to a small Jewish community in which Sephardim from the Balkans and Ashkenazim lived side by side. Of its synagogue only an archive file remains, but the cemetery still stands: about a hundred tombstones, among them Sephardi stones with epitaphs in Ladino.

A port on the Danube

Giurgiu lies on the left bank of the Danube, facing the Bulgarian shore. According to the Hebrew University’s Center for Jewish Art, which documented the town on an expedition in January 2019, its landmarks are a clock tower built by the Ottomans and the Friendship Bridge, built by the Soviets in 1952–1954. The port linked the town to the trade routes of the Balkans, and the first Jews came along those routes.

Sephardim and Ashkenazim

According to the Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust (Spector and Wigoder), as cited in Wikipedia, Sephardi Jewish merchants from the Balkans came to Giurgiu in the 1820s. Ashkenazim settled in the town later, and disputes arose between the two groups. According to the Center for Jewish Art, members of both communities were buried in the cemetery.

The tombstones tell the story of that meeting. Alongside Ashkenazi stones from the first half of the twentieth century, which are the majority, the cemetery has several horizontal Sephardi slabs, in the Sephardi manner. In the early twentieth century the Sephardim of Giurgiu also adopted the upright stele, but kept their epitaphs in Ladino. The Center for Jewish Art cites as examples the tombstones of Iosif Elias (1911) and of Mazal, wife of Isaac Caleb (1911).

A school, Zionism and decline

According to the same encyclopedia, as cited in Wikipedia, a joint Jewish school opened in the town in 1878 and had 60 pupils in 1910. In 1899 a Zionist society of 70 members was founded. In the early twentieth century the community numbered 533 people, about four per cent of the town’s population. From then on it dwindled: the 1930 census recorded 207 Jews in Giurgiu, 0.7% of the population.

The war years

Giurgiu was part of Romania’s Old Kingdom, and in the war years its Jews suffered the dispossession that befell most Jews of Wallachia, but no ghetto and no deportation. The Wiesel Commission describes how “Romanianization”, the confiscation of Jewish property, began with rural property and spread from there. In Giurgiu it reached the synagogue too: the inventory of the archive of the Federation of Jewish Communities holds a file from 1941–1944 titled “The Jewish temple and the building on Vlad Țepeș Street in Giurgiu – expropriation by the National Centre for Romanianization (CNR)”.

According to the encyclopedia, as cited in Wikipedia, 113 Jews lived in the town in 1941, and at least half of them left. After the war a community still existed in Giurgiu.

The cemetery

Another file in the Federation’s archive, from 1950–1952, preserves correspondence about the cemeteries of Giurgiu and Călărași. The Federation’s 2007 list of cemeteries records two in the town, Giurgiu I and Giurgiu II, both now belonging to the Jewish Community of Bucharest.

In January 2019 the Center for Jewish Art team found a cemetery attached to the large municipal Christian cemetery, but with its own fence and entrance. It held about a hundred tombstones. The oldest date from the late nineteenth century, and the latest from 1992 and 1996. The team reported that the cemetery was overgrown with bushes, that waste had been dumped nearby, and that its caretaker’s house was abandoned.

Giurgiu was not the only Sephardi community along the Wallachian Danube. On the same expedition the Center for Jewish Art also documented nearby Oltenița, where seven Jewish families from Bucharest had settled by 1856 and most of those buried in the cemetery are Sephardim, and Călărași, where Sephardim and Ashkenazim shared a single synagogue from 1843. The Giurgiu cemetery is thus one link in a chain of small port communities where Balkan Jews met Ashkenazi Jews.

Visiting

• The cemeteries: according to the Federation’s list (2007), Giurgiu I is on Strada Albinelor and Giurgiu II at Strada Mihai Viteazu 1. The sources do not make clear which of the two the 2019 team documented.
• Arrangements: no hours published. The cemeteries belong to the Jewish Community of Bucharest, Strada Sfânta Vineri 9–11, according to the Federation; contact it in advance.
• On the way: Giurgiu is close to Bucharest, and a visit can be combined with a day trip from the capital.
• Nearby: Bucharest; Călărași; Pitești.