The Jews of Târgu Ocna: a Community in the Salt Town

Târgu Ocna, “the market of the salt mine”, grew up around the salt mine in the Trotuș valley. Its Jews formed a middling community of merchants and craftsmen, with a great synagogue, a school and small prayer houses in the neighbourhoods. In July 1941 all of them were removed to Bacău, and only a few came back; what remains are two cemeteries.

The salt town

The settlement’s seal from the reign of Prince Alexander the Good (1407–1434) already showed a salt miner, according to the state salt company Salrom, and the mine still works today. Around it grew oil drilling, tanneries, sawmills and medicinal baths. According to JewishGen’s cemetery survey, there were seven Jewish families in the town in the 1820 census and 17 in 1831; 252 Jews in 1899 and 867 in 1930. The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) lists Târgu Ocna among the large communities of Bacău district, but adds that the Jews of Ocna and Moinești, once well-to-do, “have fallen into a state of utter penury”.

The synagogues and the school

The most detailed picture of the community comes from Willie Sabine’s “Memories from Târgu Ocna” in the memorial book of the Bacău community, published in Tel Aviv in 1990. According to Sabine, the Great Synagogue stood on Ferdinand Avenue and was the community’s spiritual centre; in its courtyard a matzah bakery worked for several months each year, and he believed it had been built at the start of the 20th century. The Little Synagogue, near the central market, was painted blue and white, and beside it was the cheder where Sabine studied from the age of four to ten. Three or four more modest prayer houses served the neighbourhoods: in the north, on the bank of the Vălcele, in the Gioseni quarter in the south, and near the community’s slaughterhouse and mikveh. The Jewish-Romanian school stood opposite the town hall; outside school hours it housed a Jewish library and a Zionist youth club, and in summer it hosted camps for pupils from Jewish schools in Bacău and Galați.

According to Sabine, about 1,500 Jews, some 400 families, lived in the town in his childhood — more than the 1930 census figure. Most were merchants and craftsmen, with shops on the main street and on Costache Negri Street, alongside doctors, lawyers and accountants. Monday was market day, when peasants from the villages sold their produce to Jewish merchants.

War, riots and Zionism

In the summer of 1917 the front line ran through the area, and the heavy fighting around Cireșoaia took many lives. According to Sabine, a special section of the cemetery was set aside for Jews who fell in the fighting, and according to JewishGen’s survey the new cemetery has a monument to Jewish soldiers. In the 1920s, writes Lika Avrahami-Guttman in the memorial book, the community suffered antisemitic riots: Romanian students destroyed synagogues and looted property “without being stopped”. In her account the community was not prominent in Zionist activity, but the youth movements produced pioneers over the years.

July 1941

Târgu Ocna remained under Romanian rule throughout the war, and its Jews were not deported to the death camps. But with the invasion of the Soviet Union the authorities removed all of them. According to Izidor Kara’s book on the Jews of Bacău, following order no. 817 of 3 July 1941, 4,000–5,000 Jews from Târgu Ocna, Moinești and the villages of the county were driven from their homes and brought to Bacău with little of their belongings; Sabine dates the evacuation to June 1941. Within three days, he writes, the “economic, social and spiritual life” of the town’s Jews “ceased”. In Bacău the evacuees were taken in by relatives and by the community’s institutions. According to Kara, the physician Dr M. Bernstein, an evacuee from Târgu Ocna, was sent to labour in Transnistria, and the Iticovici family of the town died in 1942 in the sinking of the Struma.

After 1944, according to Sabine, only a few returned, and only briefly. The community was never re-established, and a 2000 survey counted fewer than ten Jews in the town.

The two cemeteries

JewishGen’s 2000 survey describes two Jewish cemeteries. The old one, of the 18th or 19th century, is a walled plot of about 80 by 60 metres with 20 to 100 sandstone and limestone gravestones, some with portraits and Hebrew inscriptions; the land is privately owned and access is closed. The new one, of the 19th century, covers about 100 by 80 metres and holds many hundreds of gravestones in Hebrew, German and Romanian, most of them toppled or broken, and a monument to Jewish soldiers. It is owned by the Jewish community and also served the Jews of Slănic Moldova and Onești; the last known burial took place on 28 August 1998. We found no current source on a surviving synagogue in the town, and Târgu Ocna does not appear on the Federation’s synagogue list.

Visiting

• The cemeteries: both are closed; visits by prior arrangement only. We found no verified address from a current official source.
• Arrangements: Târgu Ocna has no registered community; contact the Jewish Community of Bacău or the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania.
• Nearby: Moinești; Bacău.