Pod Roșu Synagogue, Iași

La comunidad judía

Jews are recorded in Iași from the sixteenth century, and the Great Synagogue in Târgu Cucului was built on the ruins of an earlier prayer house around 1671. In the nineteenth century rabbis from Galicia, such as the Taubes family from Zhydachiv, held rabbinical posts in the city over several generations; the JewishGen translation of the Pinkas Hakehillot entry names Aharon Moshe Taubes, Shmuel Shmelke Taubes and his son Uri Feivel Shraga Taubes, and records that Iacov Taubes was rabbi of the Podu Roș district from 1868 to 1890. The Jewish population was divided among quarters such as Târgu Cucului, Păcurari and Podu Roș, each with its own main synagogue and many smaller prayer houses. Before the Second World War about 45,000 Jews lived in Iași, around half of the city's inhabitants. Iași was also a centre of antisemitism: in 1923 students there founded the Legion of the Archangel Michael, the movement that became the Iron Guard.

Arquitectura y diseño

Almost nothing is recorded about the building's form. No architect, builder, capacity or style is named in any source read, and the dimensions are unknown. A photograph dated to about 1920 is reproduced on the English Wikipedia article, but it could not be downloaded or examined in this research, so it is not described here. The Wikipedia article, citing Menahem Gutman's collection of Hasidic tales from Iași, says that the synagogue had a separate Rebbe's chamber opening off the main prayer hall, built in the manner of Hasidic synagogues and courts in Poland. A large menorah stood on the eastern wall. The same article states that the Apter Rav's contract with the communal leaders also provided for fine houses around the synagogue, but that these were never completed. A kabbalist known as Dovid Ba'al Shem kept a small kloyz, or study house, next to the synagogue. Whether the building was of brick or timber, and whether it was altered in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, is unknown.

La vida dentro de la sinagoga

The synagogue was founded for a Hasidic congregation and, according to the English Wikipedia article, prayed in the Hasidic rite rather than the Ashkenazi rite of the old Great Synagogue; that statement is marked there as lacking a citation. Its members kept the Hasidic custom after the Apter Rav left Iași. The Rebbe's chamber was left unheated for many years, and devoted Hasidim prayed there in the cold out of reverence for their rebbe; his chair was still kept in the building at least until the 1890s. In the later nineteenth century the kabbalist Dovid Ba'al Shem, said to have studied with the Maiden of Ludmir and to work wonders, prayed there and kept a kloyz beside it until his death in 1883. The synagogue was later the seat of Rabbi Avraham Elchanan 'Huna' Maizelman, the 'Poylesher Rov', a non-Hasidic specialist in marriage and divorce law who served it for 32 years until his death in 1928.

Destrucción

No source read describes damage to the synagogue during the Second World War or in the Iași pogrom of June 1941. What is recorded is that the building disappeared under Communist rule. The official Iași tourism portal, iasi.travel, names the Great Synagogue in Podu Roș and the Păcurari synagogue as the city's other two main synagogues besides the Great Synagogue in Târgu Cucului, and states that both were demolished during the Communist systematization, the programme of urban redevelopment pursued by the Communist regime. The Communist authorities therefore demolished it, but no source read names the council or ministry responsible, gives the year of demolition, or says whether the building was still in use as a synagogue at the time. A Centropa interview with Tili Solomon of Iași likewise recalls a synagogue in the city, the Cahane synagogue, being pulled down 'in the communist period, in the process of urban systematization'. The English Wikipedia claim that the Pod Roșu synagogue fell in the Ceaușescu systematization is uncited there; the iasi.travel page is the source it points to.

El destino de la comunidad

On 19 June 1941, as Romanian and Nazi German forces gathered in Iași for the invasion of the Soviet Union, the dictator Ion Antonescu ordered the registration of the city's Jews. From 29 June to 1 July 1941 Romanian police, gendarmes and soldiers, Nazi German soldiers and local civilians carried out the Iași pogrom: thousands of Jews were rounded up, many were shot in the city, and Jewish property was plundered. Survivors were forced onto two sealed freight trains. The first, with about 1,900 people, reached Podu Iloaiei after eight hours with about 1,200 dead; the second, with about 2,500 people, took six days to reach Călărași. Estimates of the dead range from 4,000 to more than 10,000, with some sources giving up to 13,000. Of the more than 110 synagogues the city once had, the Great Synagogue is the one that remains in use; a Centropa interviewee, Tili Solomon, adds a second small synagogue on Palat Street, where the few Jews still living around Podu Roș gather.

El lugar hoy

The exact plot of the synagogue has not been identified in any source read. The English Wikipedia article places it on Sinagogilor Street in the Podu Roș neighbourhood, but it also says that Sinagogilor Street was the old name of Cucu Street, which lies in the Târgu Cucului quarter, so the address is uncertain. The Podu Roș area today is a road junction and square, Piața Podu Roș, near the Bahlui river. No surviving fragment of the synagogue is recorded. The map pin for this entry marks Piața Podu Roș and is only an approximation of the neighbourhood, not the building's site.

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