Between Văcărești and Dudești: Walking Bucharest’s Jewish Quarter

Between Union Square (Piața Unirii) and the old roads of Calea Văcărești and Calea Dudești lay the district Bucharesters simply called the Mahalaua Evreiască, the Jewish quarter. Tailors, carpenters, tinsmiths, small traders, guild synagogues and modern schools were packed into its lanes. Most of those streets are gone, but anyone who knows where to look can still find synagogues, a museum, a theatre and street names that tell the story.

From the Lanes of Popescu to the Văcărești Road

The oldest core of Jewish settlement in Bucharest was the Mahalaua Popescului, behind today’s Union Square. The early Sephardi synagogue stood there – according to Rotman, a prince of the Cantacuzino family ordered it pulled down around the turn of the 18th century – and there the Sephardi community still rented its prayer house in the 19th century. The historian Liviu Rotman calls the area the “historical Jewish bedrock” of the city; from it, Jews spread south and east along the roads leading out of town towards Văcărești Monastery and the village of Dudești.

The census of 1831 counted 2,583 local Jews in Bucharest, plus 1,795 sudiți – foreign subjects under consular protection. Nearly half, 1,539 people, lived in the “Red” district (Culoarea de Roșu), which took in the Văcărești–Dudești area and the Lipscani trading quarter. Over the 19th century Jewish migrants arrived from Moldavia and the Russian Empire, and the numbers soared: 5,934 Jews in 1860, 23,887 in 1889 and 40,533 in 1899 – about 14.7% of the capital’s population, according to the Encyclopaedia Judaica. The poorest settled in Văcărești and Dudești; the wealthy gradually moved to the boulevards of the centre.

A Quarter of Craftsmen

The quarter was never a walled ghetto. Jews lived alongside Romanians, Greeks, Armenians and Bulgarians, and homes, shops and workshops stood side by side. Even so, Rotman describes it as a special kind of shtetl inside a big city, where Yiddishkeit and everyday Yiddish survived. The historian Felicia Waldman notes that in the late 19th century Jews were almost the only people in town who could fit the tin and tile roofs that replaced wooden ones, and that Jewish craftsmen painted many of Bucharest’s churches.

The quarter’s synagogues mirrored this world. Many belonged to trade guilds: the Great Tailors’ Synagogue on Strada Mămulari, known as the Holy Union Temple (Templul Unirea Sfântă), built in 1836; the Fraterna synagogue, another tailors’ guild house on Strada Mămulari, from 1863; and the carpenters’ synagogue of 1842. Alongside them stood the great Sephardi synagogue, Kahal Grande, on Strada Negru Vodă, built in 1817–1819 (sources differ), and the synagogue founded on the initiative of the Malbim in 1864, during his tenure as chief rabbi. In the 1920s and 1930s Bucharest had more than 40 synagogues.

A Hospital, a School and a Newspaper

The poor quarter was also a laboratory of modernisation. Dr Julius (Iuliu) Barasch, born in Brody, who came to Bucharest in 1841, opened a modern school for Jewish children in 1852, co-founded Israelitul Român, the first Jewish newspaper in Wallachia, in 1857, and in 1858 established, at his own expense, Bucharest’s first children’s hospital. Between the wars the community maintained 19 schools, a library and historical museum, two hospitals, a clinic, two old-age homes and two orphanages. The street where the Jewish theatre stands today bears his name: Strada Dr. Iuliu Barasch.

Meanwhile the Progressive movement grew in the city centre. The Choral Temple (Templul Coral) on Strada Sfânta Vineri, inspired by Vienna’s “Tempel”, was dedicated in 1866 (YIVO dates the dedication to 1867), and the Great Synagogue of the Polish Jews had been inaugurated earlier, in the mid-1840s. Barasch’s school, the Choral Temple and the tailors’ synagogues were where two worlds met: westernising European Jews and the working people of the quarter.

Pogrom, Emigration and Bulldozers

On 21–23 January 1941, during the Legionary rebellion, 125 Jews were murdered in Bucharest, and the quarter was hit hard: Kahal Grande was set on fire, and other synagogues, the Holy Union Temple among them, were desecrated. After the war the community numbered about 150,000, but mass emigration to Israel emptied the quarter within a decade and a half. In the 1980s the Ceaușescu regime finished the job: under “systematisation”, and to build the House of the People and the Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism (today Bulevardul Unirii), most of the quarter’s streets and several of its synagogues were demolished. We tell the story of the demolition, the synagogues lost and those that were saved in a separate article, “A Boulevard Over the Quarter”; the Malbim and his synagogue have an article of their own.

What Remains: Reading the Quarter on Foot

The remarkable thing is that what survives lies within a short walk. The tailors’ synagogue was spared – and with it, according to researchers at the Filderman Centre, half of Strada Mămulari. Since 1978 it has housed the Museum of the History of the Jews in Romania, founded on the initiative of Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen. The Choral Temple and the Great Synagogue survived too, though the latter was hemmed in by communist apartment blocks that hid it from the street. Further east, between Calea Călărași and Calea Dudești, winding cobbled streets still hold two- and three-storey houses and villas from the interwar years, some with Art Deco ornament, which the Union of Architects of Romania presented in 2023 as a unique remnant of the quarter.

• Museum of the History of the Jews in Romania – the tailors’ Holy Union Temple (1836), Strada Mămulari 3. A witness to the guilds and to life in the quarter: the “From Shtetl to the City” exhibition, a heder room and an art collection.
• Choral Temple – Strada Sfânta Vineri 9–11, the community’s main synagogue, next to the headquarters of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania (FCER).
• Great (Polish) Synagogue – Strada Vasile Adamache 11, the synagogue of the Polish Jews from the mid-19th century, home since the 1990s to an exhibition on the Holocaust in Romania.
• State Jewish Theatre (TES) – Strada Dr. Iuliu Barasch 15, in the Barașeum building, where in March 1941 a theatre opened for Jewish artists expelled from Romanian stages. Nationalised in 1948, it became a state theatre.
• The street names – Calea Văcărești, Calea Dudești, Strada Mămulari and Strada Dr. Iuliu Barasch are still on the map, even if some have changed course.
• Yeshua Tova Synagogue – Strada Tache Ionescu 9, near Piața Amzei, north of the centre rather than in the quarter itself. Built in 1827, it is an active synagogue; a separate stop to end the tour.

Visiting: A Route From Mămulari to Dudești

Start at the museum at Strada Mămulari 3, behind the Unirea shopping centre, near Piața Sfânta Vineri. According to the museum’s website it is open Monday to Thursday, 10:00–17:00 (last entry 16:30), and Sunday, 9:00–12:30, and closed on Friday, Saturday, Jewish holidays and Romanian national holidays; check the website before you go. A walk of a few minutes brings you to the Choral Temple on Strada Sfânta Vineri, and from there to the Great Synagogue on Strada Vasile Adamache. Continue east to the Jewish theatre on Strada Dr. Iuliu Barasch, and then into the side streets between Calea Călărași and Calea Dudești, where the interwar houses of the quarter survive. Fit in Yeshua Tova as a separate stop, by taxi or public transport.

Do not navigate by historic addresses: Strada Bravilor, where the Malbim synagogue stood, and Kahal Grande’s Negru Vodă 12 were swallowed by the new boulevard. Access to the Choral Temple and the Great Synagogue varies with restoration work, events and services, so arrange your visit in advance with the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania (FCER) or the Bucharest Jewish community. In active synagogues dress modestly; men should cover their heads.