The Jews in Bacău during the Holocaust

Starting with the 19th century, the number of Bacău residents of Jewish origin increased constantly, reaching, from 233 families in 1803 to 1,740 Jews in 1838, which meant 55% of the city’s population. Subsequently, although their number increased, the percentage of Jews decreased relative to the total population. At the beginning of the 20th century, in 1910, 8,209 Jews lived in Bacău, and in 1930 their number was 9,539, i.e. 30% of the total population. In the interwar period, the number of synagogues in Bacău was 30, and they were named after the guilds they represented: the synagogue of shoemakers, printers, cereal makers, etc.

Among the Jews of Bacău, the main occupations were those in the field of trade, crafts, and industry. In fact, one of the strongest businesses in the textile and tannery industry, which competed with those led by industrialists Dimitrie Mociornița, Prodanoff brothers from Tulcea, Grigore Alexandrescu from Bucharest, was that of the Filderman family, originally from Focșani and which settled in Bacău around 1876.

Over time, the Jews of Bacău built their own cultural, religious, and support buildings. Thus, the existence of the first synagogue is dated to the end of the 18th century. In the next century, there is a Talmud-Torah school, opened in 1828, a secular school - inaugurated in 1865. At the same time, the care for their less fortunate or helpless peers led the Jews of Bacău to open an orphanage and a nursing home. One of the characteristics of the Jewish community in Bacău is the adherence of some members to the Zionist movement from the very beginning. Thus, Jews from Bacău were among the first settlers in Palestine, they established in 1882 several agricultural settlements. 

The characteristic of Moldovan cities where there were Jewish communities was the occurrence of episodes of collective violence against them and accusations of ritual murder. In 1824, after selling her daughter to Turkish merchants, her mother, fearing questions that might arise from fellow citizens and especially how she would be viewed, spread the rumour that her daughter had been abducted by the Jews “to take blood from her for their religious needs”. Because of this, a Jewish family was arrested by the authorities and tortured to confess to killing the child, after bloodstains were discovered in their home. At the same time, several Jews were beaten and tortured by the locals. The discovery of the little girl in a house, safe and sound, put an end to the violence against the Jews, and the arrested family was finally released.

In October 1940, after the legionaries came to power, Bacău City Hall officials desecrated the city’s Jewish cemetery. The people of Bacău of Jewish origin lived in the months of legionary rule a “terrible horror”, as Sami Fiul confessed in an interview: “And I lived through the terrible horror in Bacău, when I remember that in the street, we had hidden in the garden, in a pit, we were afraid of being attacked, groups organized by military legionnaires were passing in the street. They knelt in the street and sang legionary songs, to our horror, which, you can imagine in what state of mind we were: frightened.”.

After Romania entered the Second World War, the Romanian authorities moved to a practice never seen before in the country: taking hostages among civilians. Thus, Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 60 were taken, hostage. At the origin of this practice seems to have been the fear of the authorities that some manifestations against them would appear among the Jews, even while Romania was at war against the Soviet Union. At the same time, such measures arose from the conviction that the Jews, perceived in the mentality of the time as Bolsheviks, could have made a pact with the Soviets. Related to this practice, the son of a former hostage mentioned in an interview:

On June 22nd, 1941, the evacuation of Jews from rural settlements began as well. After being initially taken to Moinești and Târgu Ocna, the Jews from the rural areas of the county were transported, together with the Jewish community from the two cities, to Bacău. To feed them, the Jewish community organized a canteen, where more than 1,000 people ate daily. Also, about 1,000 families, without material possibilities, were helped financially by the community. Soon, the Jews of Bacău were forced to wear the yellow star on their chests and in plain sight. Those who refused risked arrest. Moreover, starting with August 1941, Jews were forbidden to travel after 9 p.m.

Also, some of the Jews from Bacău were evacuated from their own homes and taken to the outskirts of the city. Jewish men were sent to forced labour and employed in labour detachments. In fact, many of them were sent to foreign labour detachments in Bessarabia and Transnistria.

After the end of the Second World War, Jews from the territories ceded to the USSR temporarily settled in Bacău in the summer of 1940. During the years of communism, many Jews emigrated to Israel. In 1969, after the mass emigration of Jews, there were only 600 families in the “heart of Moldova”, so that in 2005 their number would decrease to 173 people.

 

Carol Iancu, Bacău, accessible online at https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Bacau

Marius Cazan, Bacău, accessible online at http://www.inshr-ew.ro/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Bacau-revazut-ND.pdf

Sami Fiul, accessible online at https://www.centropa.org/biography/sami-fiul#The%20Jewish%20community%20in%20Bacau

George Ioan Lahovari, Marele dicționar geografic al României [The great geographical dictionary of Romania], vol. I, București, Stab. Grafic I. V. Socecu, 1898, p. 179

M. Schwarzfeld, Anuar pentru israeliți [Yearbook for the Israelites], anul al X-lea, București, Tipo-Litografia Eduard Wiegand, 1887, pp. 91-92.

Oral history interview with Paul Matasovski, accessible online at https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn504645