Great Synagogue of Briceni

La comunidad judía

Estate owners invited Jews to Briceni in 1760 to stimulate trade. The community grew quickly in the nineteenth century, from 137 families in 1817 to 7,184 people in 1897, when Jews made up 96.5 per cent of the town. In 1930 there were 5,354 Jews, and on the eve of the Second World War, with refugees and returnees, about 10,000. Most made a living from trade and crafts, above all fur-making, grain dealing and commerce with some twenty surrounding villages. The town had a Jewish hospital (1885), an old and a new Talmud Torah, a Hebrew school, libraries, a home for the aged and a Jewish savings and loan fund. There were active Zionist and youth movements. Craft guilds kept their own prayer houses. Seven synagogues were recorded in 1897, and about fourteen before the Holocaust.

Arquitectura y diseño

No photograph, plan or drawing of the synagogue is known. All descriptions come from memoirs in the Britshan memorial book. It was a large, tall building of stone. A former resident's grandfather said it 'could stand in Odessa' for its elegance. At the entrance was a balcony, then a corridor with a small synagogue on each side. From there five steps led down into the main hall, which was sunk deep into the ground. The hall was remembered for its height and size. Its dome was painted as the sky, with a bright moon and stars set into it, and the signs of the zodiac were painted around the walls. A gallery on the western side had the windows of the women's section. The large bimah stood in the centre. A later Holy Ark, paid for by the congregation, rose to the full height of the hall and was finished in blue enamel and gold.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

The big shul was the house of prayer of Briceni's working men; memoirs note that hardly any wealthy men prayed there. Two seats beside the Holy Ark were reserved, one for the scholar Rabbi Yudele Rabinowycz and one for the government-appointed rabbi Yehuda-Leib Bershevski. Bershevski led a Simchat Torah appeal that paid for a magnificent new Ark, with the gabbai Khaim Czimerman recording the pledges. The town cantor, Moshe 'Akhler', a pupil of the famous cantor Nissi Belzer, led services with a choir. Belzer himself once sang there with a choir of over thirty to a packed hall. The synagogue held community-wide occasions, including a festive service with speeches by Rabbi Efrati and Rabbi Gevelder and a crowded memorial evening. A large round matzah hung on the left wall as a sign of the eruv.

Destrucción

When the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia in June 1940, the new authorities seized Jewish homes and public buildings. They tried to turn the Great Synagogue into a communal hall, but united opposition from the Jewish residents stopped them. Under Romanian rule from July 1941, the building was used as a grain store and left in a shameful state. Survivors who returned in 1944 found pigs rooting in its broken floor. They repaired the Ark and held services there again, using Torah scrolls that the local priest had hidden. After the war the Communists, the Soviet authorities then ruling Moldova, demolished the synagogue. Christian workers brought in to tear it down refused outright. Labourers were then fetched from far away, and a bulldozer broke into the thick walls with a noise heard across the town. A survivor who left in 1956 described the demolition.

El destino de la comunidad

In June 1940 the Soviet secret police deported about 80 Jews to forced labour in Siberia, including the community president, Dr Abram Trachtenbroit. Romanian troops entered Briceni in July 1941, and Jewish homes were looted. Jews from Lipcani and Secureni were brought through the town. On 28 July 1941 the Jews of Briceni were assembled at night and marched across the Dniester to Kozlov, where they were held in an open field. From there they went on to Mogilev, where the Nazi Germans selected and murdered the elderly. They were then driven back to Ataki and Secureni, and finally deported to Transnistria. Many died on the marches, and young people were murdered in a forest near Soroca. Rabbi Shimshon Efrati was beaten to death on the way. About 1,000 Jews returned after the war. Most later left, and the 2004 census counted 52 Jews in the town.

El lugar hoy

No trace of the synagogue survives above ground, and its exact site has not been identified in modern sources. Memoirs place it in the middle of the town centre, near the old Tarhowicz market. Today the town centre is a Soviet-era square with the town hall on Strada Independenței. Briceni's large Jewish cemetery, across the river on the hill, is the main surviving physical trace of the community. It has about 5,000 gravestones. A small Jewish population remains in the district.

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