The Jews of Pitești: a Moorish Synagogue in Argeș

Pitești, capital of Argeș County and about 110 kilometres from Bucharest, was never a major Jewish centre. Yet in the 1880s Jews made up more than a tenth of its population, and the community produced the banker Mauriciu Blank and the literary critic Iosif Netzler-Trivale. The Moorish-style synagogue of the early 1920s still stands in the town centre, though the congregation has shrunk to a handful of families.

Beginnings: a cemetery in 1804 and a community of merchants

Sources differ on when Jews settled in Pitești. The local archivist Aurel Radu, writing from the Argeș National Archives, mentions a Jewish cemetery outside the town recorded as early as 1804. The researcher Ana Maria Biro, in a 2012 paper on the community, writes that Jews are generally thought to have arrived only after the Treaty of Adrianople (1829), which ended the Ottoman trade monopoly in Wallachia, and that the first municipal record of Jews dates from 1834. According to Radu, about thirty Jewish families lived in the town in 1859, and a synagogue was already counted there that year.

The community grew quickly in the following decades: according to Radu, in 1881 Pitești had 1,501 Jews out of 11,058 inhabitants — more than a tenth of the town. Most were merchants and craftsmen. According to Biro, two community schools were operating in 1868, and in 1908 an “Israelite society for mutual help” was founded to assist the sick and bereaved families. Their legal position was precarious: an 1861 circular by Prime Minister Golescu barred Jews from certain rural trades and gave those already living in villages fifteen days to leave, and the 1866 Constitution reserved citizenship for Christians. Full equality came only in 1919 and was anchored in the Constitution of 1923.

Two notable figures came from Pitești. Mauriciu Blank, born in the town, was a partner in the Marmorosch, Blank & Co. bank, founded in 1874, which grew into one of Romania’s leading banks; according to Radu he left 400,000 lei to the town hall for the poor. Iosif Netzler-Trivale, a literary critic born in 1889, fell on 10 November 1916 at Zimnicea as a soldier in an Argeș regiment; in 1933 his remains were moved to the Filantropia cemetery in Bucharest.

The synagogue: neo-Moorish with a local touch

According to Radu, the old synagogue, the bathhouse and the primary school (dating from 1849) stood on Strada Egalității and were demolished in 1922 to make way for a new synagogue and school. The date of the present synagogue is disputed: the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania lists 1925; Biro gives 1920–1924; local press gives 1919–1924 or 1919–1921, with the foundation stone laid in 1920. According to a study based on the Argeș archives, the stone was laid in the presence of the minister Constantin Angelescu. In 2021 the community marked the building’s centenary with a festive concert for Rosh Hashanah.

Local press attributes the design to the Viennese architect Jacob Gartner; we found no archival source for this. The building is Moorish in style, with a four-column entrance and a plain terrace above it, and a vaulted central hall whose decoration also draws on local building traditions. According to Biro it is the only synagogue left in Pitești and is a listed historic monument (AG-II-m-B-13414). Next to it stands the former Jewish school, also listed (AG-II-m-B-13415), which according to Biro was converted into a restaurant in 2009.

1940–1944: searches, “Romanianization” and forced labour

When the Second World War began, about 140 Jewish families — some 400 people — lived in Pitești, according to Radu: less than a third of the 1881 figure. The community had gained legal status in 1932 and was led by Avram Wechsler. Under the National Legionary State (September 1940 – January 1941), police and members of the Legionary “order service” searched the homes and shop of the merchant Mișu Michelstein on 4–5 October 1940 and also seized the community’s archive. During the Legionary rebellion of January 1941 Legionaries barricaded themselves in the town’s police headquarters; according to Radu, the gendarmerie report on the rebellion mentions no attacks on Jews.

Under the Antonescu regime, anti-Jewish policy intensified. According to the local studies, Jewish-owned buildings were nationalized — except the synagogue, which was placed under the temporary administration of the National Romanianization Centre — and the owners stayed on as tenants paying high rents; the Jewish school was leased to the police. Jews from the villages of Argeș County were forcibly moved into Pitești, Jewish shops were liquidated or handed to “ethnic Romanians”, and Jewish men were assigned to forced labour. In 1941–1942 the county’s Jews were made to contribute more than seven million lei to the “Reunification Loan”. In December 1941 the town printed a notice restricting Jews’ movement; a copy survives in the collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. At the end of 1941, according to Jurnalul de Argeș, about ninety Jews from Ploiești were sent to Pitești after passing through the Teiș camp near Târgoviște.

The Jews of Pitești were not subjected to mass deportation, but according to the same sources more than fifty of them, and of the Ploiești Jews sent to the town, were deported individually to Transnistria in 1942 on charges of “economic sabotage” or communist activity — among them members of the county office of the Jewish Central. That same year, with help from the Jewish leadership in Bucharest, a school class and a public canteen were opened in the synagogue building. From 1942 the town’s rabbi was Moise Davidovici.

After the war and today

Emigration to Israel reduced the community drastically. From 1993 to 2002, according to Biro, it was led by Leopold (Lazăr) Schobel, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau who settled in Pitești after the war and died in 2003. In 2021 the community had 58 members, half of them over sixty, according to Revista Agressive; in 2023 Jurnalul de Argeș wrote of only three or four families. According to the same report the synagogue had been closed for years and was deteriorating, and the community president, Aurel Davidovici, agreed to open it as a cultural space for concerts and exhibitions — continuing a tradition that began in 2010, when Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabaeus was performed there. The Federation still lists the synagogue as in use. The community is registered with the Federation under president Aurel Davidovici, and the tiny community of Râmnicu Vâlcea is affiliated to it.

The cemetery

The old cemetery on Strada Trivale was moved after 1900, according to Radu, and by 1941 an artillery regiment occupied the site; according to Biro, its relocation was already being debated at the town hall in 1915–1916. The present cemetery, according to the JewishGen Cemetery Discovery Project survey of 2001, covers about 1.5 hectares on an urban hill beside other cemeteries, enclosed by a wall with a locked gate. The oldest stone found dates from 1896; the inscriptions are in Hebrew, German and Romanian, and there is a tahara house and a Holocaust memorial. Among those buried here is Rabbi Hascal Wechsler, who died in 1940 aged 83. According to the survey, and to Biro in 2012, the site is maintained and guarded by a caretaker employed by the community. The sources give different street addresses, so arrange your visit with the community.

Visiting

• Synagogue: opened from time to time for cultural events and holidays; no opening hours are published.
• Cemetery: locked gate; visits by arrangement.
• Arrangements: Jewish Community of Pitești, tel. +40 248 211 781 per the Federation’s website.
• Nearby: Târgoviște and Craiova, and the Beth Israel synagogue in Ploiești.