Tailors' Synagogue, Iași

PANORAMICA

La storia di Tailors' Synagogue, Iași

Iași, the old capital of Moldavia, had one of the largest Jewish communities in Romania, and before the Second World War it counted well over a hundred synagogues and prayer houses. Many belonged to craft guilds. Pinkas Hakehillot Romania notes that each craft association had its own synagogue and that the tailors had several. The historian I. Kara, whose list is reproduced on jewish-romania.ro, records four tailors' (Croitori) prayer houses: one at Sinagogilor Street 1, burnt in 1822, rebuilt in 1824, founded or refounded in 1847 and taken out of use in 1978; one at Sfântul Teodor Street 30, repaired in 1907; one at Broscăriei Street 12; and a 'young tailors' house at Bașotă Street 8, out of use after 1970.

The building is known by name from the interview Centropa recorded with Rosa Kaiserman. Her grandfather, a tailor, prayed at 'the Tailor's Synagogue', and her father went there as a young man. After it was destroyed he moved to the Cahane synagogue on Ștefan cel Mare Street, which was itself later demolished. The interview does not say which of Kara's four buildings the family attended. None of them is among the four synagogue buildings Kara found still standing in Iași in September 1995, so the building is gone. This entry is pinned at the Sinagogilor Street house, the oldest of the four.

POSIZIONE

Where it stood for 171 years

Historic: Str. Sinagogilor 1, Iași (Kara's no. 28; other tailors' houses at Str. Sf. Teodor 30, Str. Broscăriei 12 and Str. Bașotă 8). Present: Strada Sinagogilor, Centru, Iași, beside the Great Synagogue. Approximate.

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La comunità ebraica

Jews are recorded in Iași from the seventeenth century, and the Great Synagogue in the Târgu Cucului quarter was built on land bought in 1657. A charter of 1714 confirmed the community's ownership of the land. By the nineteenth century Jews made up a very large share of the city's craftsmen. Pinkas Hakehillot says most craftsmen in Iași were Jewish, apart from the metalworkers, and lists prayer houses of hatters, tailors, carpenters, barrel makers, tanners, shoemakers, butchers and musicians. Each guild kept its own house of prayer, and the tailors and builders had four or five each. Kara's list counts four tailors' houses, one of them for young tailors. Kehilalinks gives 127 synagogues in the city around 1930; Pinkas Hakehillot counts 112 houses of prayer in 1939; and the community president reported 140 in 1944. Most of these were small rooms or modest buildings serving one trade or one neighbourhood. The Tailors' Synagogue was one of them, a working men's congregation in the old Jewish quarter around Sinagogilor Street.

Architettura e design

No photograph, plan or description of any of the Iași tailors' synagogues was found, so the building's size, materials and form are unknown. Kara's list gives only addresses and dates. The house at Sinagogilor Street 1 shared its street address with the Great Synagogue, which suggests it stood in the same courtyard or block of the old synagogue quarter, where Sinagogilor Street took its name from the many synagogues on it. Kara records that it burnt in 1822 and was rebuilt in 1824, so the building that survived into the twentieth century dated from the 1820s. The Sfântul Teodor Street house was repaired in 1907. Pinkas Hakehillot and the 2010 report of the US Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad describe most Iași prayer houses as small one-room halls or storefront rooms, and the guild synagogues may have been of this type, but no source describes the Tailors' Synagogue itself.

La vita nella sinagoga

The Tailors' Synagogue served men of one trade. Membership passed down in families: Rosa Kaiserman told Centropa that her father prayed there in his youth because his own father was a tailor and worshipped there. Guild synagogues of this kind combined prayer with the social life of the trade, and in Iași they stood side by side with the houses of the shoemakers, hatters, carpenters, butchers and musicians. Kara's list shows that tailors had enough members to support four separate houses, including one for young tailors, which suggests the apprentices and journeymen prayed apart from the master craftsmen. No rabbi, cantor or warden of the Tailors' Synagogue is named in the sources read. The Sinagogilor Street house was still in use as a synagogue until 1978, according to Kara, which makes it one of the last guild prayer houses to function in the city.

Distruzione

No source gives the date of demolition or names the body that ordered it. Rosa Kaiserman's interview says only that when the Tailors' Synagogue was destroyed the number of Jews had shrunk and that all the other synagogues were destroyed too; her father then moved to the Cahane synagogue, which was demolished later, in the Communist period according to the community's account. Kara's list records the Sinagogilor Street house as taken out of use in 1978 and the young tailors' house at Bașotă Street after 1970. By September 1995 only four synagogue buildings stood in Iași, and none of them was a tailors' synagogue. Kara attributes the city's losses to wartime bombing, emigration and the systematization of the city under Ceaușescu's Communist regime, and two neighbouring buildings in the same quarter were demolished for systematization, the Zisu Herman synagogue in 1979 among them. Whether the Tailors' Synagogue was among the buildings cleared for systematization is not recorded, and nobody is named as having demolished it.

Il destino della comunità

Jews in Iași were attacked repeatedly in the twentieth century. In 1928 students wrecked the synagogue on Păcurari Street. In the pogrom that began on 28 June 1941, Romanian soldiers and military police, Nazi German soldiers and armed local civilians robbed and murdered Jews across the city; Pinkas Hakehillot says the Nazis were in the forefront of the shooting, and a Romanian general's report spoke of a German plot carried out with the Legionnaires (Iron Guard). Of those detained at the police courtyard, only about 2,500 were alive by evening. The survivors were packed into two death trains. Of 2,430 Jews on the first train, 1,411 died on the way, and 1,194 died on the second over a short distance. Estimates of the dead range from about 1,200 to 10,000; the 2010 US Commission report gives more than 13,000. Forty synagogues were looted during the war, and in 1943-44 the mayor turned synagogues into stables. Kara names emigration as one cause of the loss of the city's synagogues after the war. Kehilalinks puts today's community at about 300 to 600 people with one working synagogue.

Il luogo oggi

The exact site of the Tailors' Synagogue is not known, because the witness did not say which of the four tailors' houses her family used. The house at Sinagogilor Street 1 stood in the old synagogue quarter of Târgu Cucului, on the present Strada Sinagogilor beside the surviving Great Synagogue, which is now restored and still holds services. Kara records that neighbouring synagogues in the quarter were demolished for systematization. Bașotă Street, site of the young tailors' house, runs nearby, and Sfântul Teodor Street lies a few hundred metres to the west. No trace of any tailors' synagogue is recorded at these addresses. A memorial to the victims of the 1941 pogrom stands in the garden on Strada Sinagogilor.

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