Bleizer (Blinzer) Synagogue, Galați

הקהילה היהודית

Jews are documented in Galați from the end of the sixteenth century. Pogroms and blood libels struck the community in 1796, 1846, 1859 and 1867, and synagogues were burned or looted several times. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Jews moved up from the harbour area to the hill of the town, settling especially on Cojocarilor, Israelite (later Războieni), Serii, Movilei, Tecuci, Română and Traian streets. The community grew quickly in the nineteenth century: Pinkas Hakehillot gives 13,066 Jews in 1890, 22.1 per cent of the town. By 1913 Galați had the fourth-largest Jewish community of the Old Kingdom, after Bucharest, Iași and Botoșani, and the 1930 census counted 19,915 people of the Mosaic faith, almost a fifth of the population. The community maintained schools, including a gymnasium, a hospital, an orphanage, an old people's home and two ritual baths. Rabbi Yaakov Margulies led it from 1896 until his death in 1962. Before the war the town had about twenty synagogues, many of them founded by guilds and Hasidic or neighbourhood groups.

אדריכלות ועיצוב

No photograph, plan or description of the building's appearance has been found. The community's 1931 history says only that the original prayer house of 1847 consisted of two rooms that already stood on the donated plot, and that it was fitted out with prayer books and ritual objects from collections and gifts. It received small repairs over the years until 1922, when it was rebuilt in its entirety from synagogue funds and donations at a cost of 120,000 lei. For comparison, the same history gives 60,000 lei for a 1926 repair of the Habad synagogue on the same street and 1,400,000 lei for the value of the larger Chesed shel Emes synagogue, which suggests that the rebuilt Bleizer Synagogue was a modest building. With 90 members in 1931 it was one of the smaller congregations listed. Its architect or builder, its plan, its style, its materials and its seating capacity are unknown.

החיים בבית הכנסת

The Bleizer Synagogue was a neighbourhood house of prayer for the Jews of the hill district, where several other small synagogues stood on the same street, among them the Habad synagogue at Războieni 11 and the synagogue of the Jewish cab drivers. Pinkas Hakehillot records that in 1847 'the orthodox Jews' founded a synagogue in Galați, one year after the Hasidic Habad synagogue; this date matches the Blinzer prayer house, although the encyclopaedia does not name it. The congregation kept itself from its own funds and from gifts. In 1931 it was run by a committee of Iosif Cohn, Avram Freiberg, Moise Srulovici, Berl Bercovici and Ițic Mihailovici, the same men who had overseen the rebuilding of 1922. Its gabbaim, the wardens elected by the members to administer the synagogue, were then Iosif Cohn, Iancu Levac and Ițic Mihailovici. Nothing is recorded about its rabbi, its cantor, its services or its religious affiliation beyond this.

הרס

No source found describes what happened to the Bleizer Synagogue or gives a date for its loss. Arthur Viorel Tuluș, in his 2016 study of Galați's synagogues, writes that apart from the Craftsmen's Temple all the town's synagogues collapsed or were demolished, either as a result of the destruction of the town in the Second World War or through urban redevelopment in the Communist period. He also names earthquakes and the emigration of the Jews to Israel. The great earthquake of 9-10 November 1940 brought down the Choral Temple. Pinkas Hakehillot states that after the armistice of August 1944 Nazi German forces set fire to whole districts, especially the Jewish ones, and burned the Great Synagogue, the modern prayer house and the Orthodox study house of the craftsmen and tailors; the Bleizer Synagogue is not named. KehilaLinks lists it among synagogues no longer in existence, and in 1999 community president Avram Vacs said that only one of the twenty synagogues still stood. Whether it was destroyed in 1940, in 1944, or demolished later by the Communist authorities, and by whom, is unknown.

גורל הקהילה

Galați's Jews were persecuted under the Legionnaire government of 1940-1941 and the military regime that followed. On 30 June 1940, during the retreat from Bessarabia, Romanian soldiers killed civilians, Jews among them, at Galați. In September 1940, under the Legionnaire government, fifty prominent Jews were declared hostages. In June 1941 about 3,700 Jewish men were held in a local cinema and then interned at Filești, and from July 1941 Jews had to wear the yellow star. Men were sent to forced-labour sites such as Făurei, Roseti and Cotul Lung, where conditions were inhuman. Pinkas Hakehillot gives 13,511 Jews in 1941 and 13,000 in 1947. After the war the community cared for refugees and returning labour conscripts, but emigration, mostly to Israel, emptied it: about 9,000 Jews remained in 1950, about 450 in 1969 and about 140 at the time of the 2016 study. The Craftsmen's Temple on Dornei Street is the community's only remaining synagogue.

האתר כיום

The exact plot of Războieni 1 has not been identified. Războieni Street, the former Israelite Street, still runs through the Ignat Rizea district of Galați on the hill above the Danube, but no source consulted says what now stands where the synagogue was, whether any part of it survives, or whether the house numbers have changed since 1931. Tuluș attributes the loss of many of the town's synagogues to Communist-era urban redevelopment. No marker for the synagogue is recorded. The map pin for this entry is placed on Războieni Street itself and marks the street, not the building. Old cadastral or city plans of Galați, the 1910 town map mentioned by KehilaLinks, or the files of the Galați county archives would be needed to fix the site.

שמות בולטים