The Sephardim of Bucharest: From Ottoman Traders to the Cemetery Across from Bellu

Sephardic Jews lived in Bucharest before the city was the capital of Romania: traders and moneylenders from the Ottoman Balkans, among them descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain. The community was always small, but it was the first in the city, and it produced bankers, schools and two splendid synagogues. Of everything it built, what survives above ground is chiefly one cemetery, across the road from Bellu.

In the Responsa of Balkan Rabbis: The First Mentions

According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, Bucharest’s Jewish community is first mentioned in the mid-16th century, in the responsa of Balkan rabbis, among them Rabbi Samuel de Medina of Salonica. Its members were merchants and moneylenders from Turkey and the Balkan lands, at a time when the Principality of Wallachia was under Ottoman suzerainty. The historian Anca Tudorancea sums it up: the community of Spanish origin was always small, but it was the first to settle in Bucharest.

The Ottoman connection was also a liability. In 1593, as he rose against the Ottomans, Prince Michael the Brave ordered the massacre of Bucharest’s Jews together with the city’s other “Turkish” subjects. Only in the mid-17th century did a new community take shape, by then mostly Ashkenazi. From then on the Sephardim were a minority within Jewish Bucharest, one that kept its own rite, language and institutions.

1730: Recognition as a Separate Community

The 18th century began with a blow. According to a research presentation on the community, in 1714 Prince Stephen Cantacuzino ordered the Sephardic synagogue in Bucharest demolished and banned gatherings for prayer. Less than twenty years later the picture was reversed: in 1730 Prince Nicholas Mavrocordat recognized the Sephardim as a separate, independent community. The same year appears in a 1904 letter by the community leader Lazar Ascher, who wrote that the community’s boys’ school had existed “since 1730”.

In practice, the community grew only at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. According to the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the Sephardim first prayed in a rented house in Mahalaua Popescului; in 1811 they founded their own burial society, and in 1818 they received permission to build a synagogue. In 1854 some 150 families established a fully independent community, separate from the Ashkenazi one.

Bankers, Teachers and Two Temples

The Sephardim were few, but their place in the city was prominent. The Halfon family were pioneers of banking and credit in Romania, and the banker Solomon Halfon long headed the community and helped fund it. Another banker, Lazar Ascher, chaired the schools committee. The community’s spiritual leader for 32 years was Rabbi Haim Bejerano, who spoke eight languages, translated religious texts and was a confidant of Queen Elisabeth, wife of King Carol I. In 1910 he moved to Edirne, and he later served as Hakham Bashi, chief rabbi of Turkey.

The most detailed picture of the community comes from Lazar Ascher himself, in a letter of 16 February 1904 to the Spanish senator Ángel Pulido, who was collecting accounts of the Sephardim of Eastern Europe. According to the letter, four rooms for the boys’ school were built in the courtyard of the Great Temple in 1817, and the school received a new building in 1894. The girls’ school was founded in 1878; its building went up in 1891 at a cost of 120,000 francs, donated by the descendants of Nissim and Lea Halfon. Both schools were free of charge.

Two synagogues stood at the center of communal life. The larger, Kahal Grande on Strada Negru Vodă, was widely considered the most beautiful synagogue in the city; its full story, from construction to burning, is told in a separate article. The second, Kahal Cicu, the “Small Spanish Temple”, was built in 1846 at Strada Banu Mărăcine 37 in the Popescu quarter and, according to the magazine Historia, rebuilt in 1883.

The Fire of 1941 and the Years After

In the Legionary pogrom of 21–23 January 1941, 125 Jews were murdered in Bucharest and many synagogues were looted and set on fire. According to the historian Anca Ciuciu, both Sephardic temples were among the buildings burned. Kahal Cicu was restored after the war and demolished in the 1980s for the Boulevard of Union (sources differ between 1986 and 1987); according to Historia, the service yard of the Unirea department store now occupies its site. That decade of demolitions is the subject of our article on the vanished Jewish quarter.

After 1948, with communist nationalization, the community declined rapidly, and many of its members emigrated to Israel. According to the Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust, some 7,000 Sephardim lived in Romania on the eve of the war, most of them in Bucharest. Those who remained continued to stand out, above all in cultural and artistic life.

The Cemetery Across from Bellu: An Archive in Stone

The Jewish cemetery of the Sephardic rite lies in the south of the city, in the Bellu Cemetery area. According to several sources it opened in 1865. It is an active cemetery, administered by the Jewish Community of Bucharest. It should not be confused with the large Jewish cemetery at Șoseaua Giurgiului 162, which has its own article.

The Sephardic cemetery also holds remains from the darkest chapter in the city’s history. In 1942–1944, under the Antonescu regime, the old Jewish cemetery on Strada Sevastopol in central Bucharest was dismantled; it was one of the few places where Sephardim and Ashkenazim had been buried side by side. According to an investigation by Scena9, the exhumed remains were reburied in the Șoseaua Giurgiului cemetery and in the Sephardic cemetery near Bellu, and 32 headstones were moved to the Sephardic cemetery. Sources also record an obelisk to Sephardic Jewish soldiers who fell in the First World War.

The rows of headstones map the community itself: according to a study of the Sephardim of the Principalities, Jews born in Turkey, Greece, Italy, Austria, Serbia, Macedonia, France and Bulgaria are buried here. The most recent generations are buried here too, among them the pianist Dan Mizrahy, laid to rest in the Sephardic cemetery in 2010.

Visiting

The cemetery lies across the road from Bellu Cemetery, at the junction of the main roads in the south of the city. Recent photographs show its gate at Șoseaua Olteniței 2, while Jewish Heritage Europe and other sources give the address as Șoseaua Giurgiului 2. Navigate to the gate rather than relying on a street number alone.

• Arrangements: no opening hours are published. Arrange a visit in advance with the Jewish Community of Bucharest; the Federation’s website lists the administrator of the Sephardic cemetery.
• Shabbat and holidays: as is customary at Jewish cemeteries, do not plan a visit on Shabbat or Jewish holidays.
• Kohanim: check the walking route and access options in advance.
• Family research: a Sephardic surname alone is no proof of kinship. Cross-check headstone inscriptions against community records and archives.

To see the city the Sephardim lived in, the area around Strada Negru Vodă and the Boulevard of Union is a short drive north, near the Holy Union Temple and the Museum of the History of the Jews in Romania.