History of the Jews in Bessarabia


The history of the Jews in Bessarabia, a historical region in Eastern Europe, dates back hundreds of years.

Early history

Jews are mentioned from very early on in the Principality of Moldavia, but they did not represent a significant number. Their main activity in Moldavia was commerce, but they could not compete with Greeks and Armenians, who had knowledge of Levantine commerce and relationships.
Several times, when Jewish merchants created monopolies in some places in north Moldavia, Moldavian rulers sent them back to Galicia and Podolia. One such example was during the reign of Petru Șchiopul, who favored the English merchants led by William Harborne.
In the 18th century, more Jews started to settle in Moldavia. Some of them were in charge of the Dniester crossings, replacing Moldavians and Greeks, until the captain of Soroca demanded their expulsion.
Others traded with spirits, first brought in from Ukraine, afterward building local velnițas on boyar manors. The number of Jews increased significantly during the Russo-Turkish War, when the Podolia-Moldavia border was open.
When this war ended, in 1812, Bessarabia was annexed by the Russian Empire.
A cemetery was established in the early 19th century.

Governorate of Bessarabia (1812–1917)

Status

The 1818 Statutory Law of the Governorate of Bessarabia mentions Jews as a separate state, which was further divided into merchants, tradesmen, and land-workers. Unlike the other states, Jews were not allowed to own agricultural land, with the exception of "empty lots only from the property of the state, for cultivation and for building factories". Jews were allowed to keep and control the sale of spirits on government and private manors, to hold "mills, velnițas, breweries, and similar holdings", but were explicitly disallowed to "rule over Christians". During the 1817 census, there were 3,826 Jewish families in Bessarabia.

Rural colonies

Over the next generations, the Jewish population of Bessarabia grew significantly. Unlike most of the rest of the Russian Empire, in Bessarabia, Jews were allowed to settle in fairs and cities. Tsar Nicholas I issued an ukaz that allowed Jews to settle in Bessarabia "in a higher number", giving settled Jews two years free of taxation. At the same time, Jews from Podolia and Kherson Governorates were given five years free of taxation if they crossed the Dniester and settle in Bessarabia.
As a result, the merchant activity was not enough to sustain all Jews, which led the Tsarist authorities to create 17 Jewish agricultural colonies:

In Soroca County">Soroca County (Romania)">Soroca County

  • Dumbrăveni
  • Brăciova
  • Mărculești
  • Vârtojani
  • Lublin
  • Căprești
  • Zgurița
  • Maramonovca

    In Orhei County">Orhei County (Romania)">Orhei County

  • Șibca
  • Nicolaevca-Blagodați
  • Teleneștii Noi

    In [Chișinău County]

  • Grătiești and Hulboaca under joint administration

    In Bălți County">Bălți County (Romania)">Bălți County

  • Alexăndreni
  • Valea lui Vlad

    In [Hotin County]

  • Lomacința

    In Tighina County">Tighina County (Romania)">Tighina County

  • Romanăuți
10,589 Jews were settled in these villages, forming 1,082 households. This plan was borrowed from the ideas of Emperor Joseph II of Austria in regard to Bukovina Jews, but it became impractical as there Jews preferred to leave Bukovina than to settle in villages. The impression that Jews would not stay in the rural areas was proved wrong by the Russian Tzar, as his colonization at first seemed a success. However, after several years, Jews in these rural colonies preferred merchant activities with cattle, leather, wool, tobacco, while their agricultural land was mostly rented out to Christian peasants. After more years, many of these Jews moved to fairs and sold their land to Moldavians. During the 1856 census, there were 78,751 Jews in Bessarabia.

Late 19th and early 20th centuries

  • 1889: There were 180,918 Jews of a total population of 1,628,867 in Bessarabia, or 11.11%
  • 1897: The Jewish population had grown to 225,637 of a total of 1,936,392, or 11.65%
  • 1903: Chișinău, in Russian Bessarabia had a Jewish population of 50,000, or 46%, out of a total of approximately 110,000. Jewish life flourished with 16 Jewish schools and over 2,000 pupils in Chișinău alone.

    Kishinev pogrom

There were two massacres in Kishinev in 1903 and 1905 known as the Kishinev pogroms.
In 1903, a Christian Ukrainian boy, Mikhail Ribalenko, was found murdered in the town of Dubăsari, about northeast of Chișinău; the town is on the left bank of the river Dniester and was not a part of Bessarabia. Although it was clear that the boy had been killed by a relative, the government called it a ritual murder plot by the Jews. The mobs were incited by Pavel Krushevan, the editor of the Russian language anti-Semitic newspaper Bessarabian and the vice-governor Ustrugov. The newspaper regularly accused the Jewish community of numerous crimes, and on multiple occasions published headlines such as "Death to the Jews!" and "Crusade Against the Hated Race!" They used the age-old calumny against the Jews.
Viacheslav Plehve, the Minister of Interior, supposedly gave orders not to stop the rioters. However, the pogrom lasted for three days, without the intervention of the police. Forty seven Jews were killed, 92 severely wounded, 500 slightly wounded and over 700 houses destroyed. Despite a world outcry, only two men were sentenced to seven and five years and 22 were sentenced for one or two years. This pogrom is considered the first state-inspired action against Jews in the 20th century and was instrumental in convincing tens of thousands of Russian Jews to leave to the West and to Palestine.
Many of the younger Jews, including Mendel Portugali, made an effort to defend the community.

1917–1940

Moldavian Democratic Republic

In the Sfatul Țării, Bessarabian Jews were represented by:
  • Isac Gherman, 60 years old, lawyer from Chișinău
  • Eugen Kenigschatz, 58, lawyer, Chișinău
  • Samuel Lichtmann, 60, civil servant
  • Moise Slutski, 62, physician, Chișinău
  • Gutman Landau, 40, civil servant
  • Mendel Steinberg
The former four abstained from vote for the Union of Bessarabia with Romania on, while the latter two were absent.

Greater Romania

  • 1920: The Jewish population had grown to approx. 267,000.
  • 1930: Romanian census registers 270,000 Jews

    The Holocaust

Many people was deported to Siberia from the region following the Soviet takeover, including a disproportionate number of Jews. According to the authoritative 1995 estimate of Dov Levin, the top expert in the history of the Jews in the territories occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939-1940, with which Jean Ancel concurred in 1998, the number of Bukovinian Jews who were deported to Soviet Asia in June 1941 was 5,000, together with 10,000 from Bessarabia; about half of those deported from Bessarabia survived and returned to Bessarabia according to a source mentioned by Jean Ancel, the specialist on the Holocaust in Romania and Transnistria. According to Dr. Avigdor Schachan, who wrote a book about the Transnistrian ghettos, and was himself brought up in the Bessarabian part of the present-day Chernivtsi Oblast of Ukraine, about 2,000 northern Bukovinian and 4,000 Bessarabian Jews were deported to the Soviet east. The total number of deportees from Soviet Moldova to Siberia in June 1941 was 31,699, while 8,374 were deported from the Chernivtsi oblast of Ukraine and 3,767 from the Izmail oblast of Ukraine ; the total was 43,840. In his 2011 book on the Holocaust in Romania, Ancel noted that "thousands" of Chernivtsi Jews were deported to Siberia.
In 1941, the Einsatzkommandos, German mobile killing units drawn from the Nazi SS and commanded by Otto Ohlendorf entered Bessarabia. They were instrumental in the massacre of many Jews in Bessarabia, who did not flee in face of the German advance. On 8 July 1941, Mihai Antonescu, deputy prime minister and Romania's ruler at the time, made a declaration in front of the Ministers' Council:
The killing squads of Einsatzgruppe D, with special non-military units attached to the German Wehrmacht and Romanian Armies were involved in many massacres in Bessarabia, while deporting other thousands to Transnistria. The majority of Jews from Bessarabia fled before the retreat of the Soviet troops. Perhaps as many as 100,000 to 130,000 Jews from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina left with the Soviets, including 124,000 according to Radu Ioanid. According to the Yad Vashem database, the number of Bessarabian Jews, excluding the deportees, who were registered during the evacuation in the interior of the Soviet Union was 49,435. However, 110,033 Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina — all except a small minority of the Jews that did not flee in 1941 — were deported to Transnistria, a region that was under Romanian military control during 1941–1944.
In ghettos organized in several towns, as well as in camps many people died from starvation, bad sanitation, or by being shot by special Nazi units right before the arrival of Soviet troops in 1944. The Romanian military administration of Transnistria kept very poor records of the people in the ghettos and camps. The only exact number found in Romanian sources is that 59,292 who reached Transnistria died in the ghettos and camps from the moment those were open until September 1, 1943. This number includes all internees regardless of their origin, but does not include those that perished on the way to the camps, those that perished between mid-1943 and spring 1944, as well as the thousands who perished in the immediate aftermath of the Romanian army's taking control of Transnistria.
In June–July 1941, about 10,000 were killed during the military action in the region in 1941 by German Einzatsgruppe D units and on some occasions by some Romanian troops. In Sculeni, several dozen local Jews were killed by the Romanian troops. In Bălți around 150 local civilians were shot by Einzatsgruppe, and 14 Jewish POWs by the Romanians. In Mărculești, 486 Soviet POWs of Jewish origin, who were left behind by the Soviet army because of wounds, to avoid being surrounded, were shot.
Approximately 40 corpses of Jews were found dumped at the outskirts of Orhei, executed either by the German or Romanian units.
File:După trecerea unui convoi între Birzula și Grozdovca.jpg|thumb|left|Aftermath of the Odessa Massacre: Jewish deportees killed outside Brizula
From 1941 to 1942, 120,000 Jews from Bessarabia, all of Bukovina, and the Dorohoi county in Romania proper, were deported by the Romanian authorities to ghettos and concentration camps in Transnistria, with only a small portion returning in 1944. The number of Jewish deportees to Transnistria sent there in 1941 who reached the latter province included 110,033 people, including 55,867 from Bessarabia, 43,798 from Bukovina, 10,368 from Dorohoi; out of these, 50,741 still survived by September 1, 1943. A further 4,000 Chernivtsi Jews were deported to Transnistria in June 1942. According to the Romanian gendarmerie, on September 1, 1943, 50,741 Jewish deportees survived in Transnistria, including 36,761 from Bukovina, including Dorohoi County, and 13,980 from Bessarabia. According to the statistics from the office of the Romanian prime minister of November 15, 1943, by province of origin from Romania and of county of residence in Transnistria, in the latter area there were 49,927 Jewish deportees who had survived, including 31,141 from Bukovina, 11,683 from Bessarabia, 6,425 from Dorohoi County, and 678 from the rest of Romania. According to the foremost Israeli scholarly study on the Holocaust by Leni Yahil, almost 60,000 Jewish deportees survived in Transnistria. According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 55,000 to 60,000 of the Jewish deportees to Transnistria survived the Holocaust. Another estimate of the total number of Bessarabian Jews who survived the deportations to Transnistria was 20,000, which also indicates that a large majority of the deportees died in Transnistria. The ones who died did so in the most inhuman and horrible conditions. According to Wolf Moskovich, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the article "Bessarabia", in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, "Only a third of the deported Jews survived Transnistria." According to Wolf Moskovich in the same article, "In all, some 100,000 Bessarabian Jews perished during World War II." According to the Yad Vashem database, 60,732 Jews whose names are listed who had lived in Bessarabia before the war were killed during World War II, while 133 died indirectly in relation to the Holocaust. The number of Jews listed by name who died or were killed in the Holocaust or Soviet repression who had lived in northern and southern Bukovina before the war in the Yad Vashem database as of 2025 was 50,749, whereas 7 died indirectly died because of the Holocaust, and 1,707 were "registered following the evacuation/ in the Interior of the Soviet Union".
Shargorod was one of the few localities in Transnistria where most Bessarabian Jewish deportees survived the Holocaust. Many of the Jews in this ghetto died of disease, 1,449 from a typhus epidemic in early 1942, or were deported to labor camps, leaving only about 2,971 deported Jews alive on September 1, 1943, though about 500 Jews originally from Dorohoi were relocated to the village of Capushterna in 1943, as a part of the relocation of 1,000 Jews to ten nearby villages. Before the war, 2,145 of those who died during the Holocaust in Shargorod had lived in Romania before the war according to the Yad Vashem database. Out of them, 1,672 had lived in Bukovina before the war. Moreover, 76 had lived in Bessarabia before the war, while 301 had lived in Dorohoi and the adjacent localities. Most of the Bessarabian Jews who died in Shargorod whose names are known came from Hotin. At the other end of the spectrum were the 7,000 or more Jews from Bessarabia who were sent to, and executed in, the Bogdanovka concentration camp in December 1941. For information on the history of the Jews of Chisinau, the capital of Bessarabia and of the present-day Republic of Moldova, including during the Holocaust, see History of the Jews in Chișinău. For more information on the Holocaust in Transnistria, including on the fate of the Jewish deportees from Bessarabia, see History of the Jews in Transnistria.
The remainder of the 270,000 Jewish community of the region survived World War II, primarily consisting of Bessarabian Jews who fled in advance of the Soviet troop withdrawal in mid-July 1941. While they survived the period between 1941-1944, the conditions they endured during their relocation to the interior of the Soviet Union—such as to Uzbekistan in the summer of 1941—were harsh. The journey and subsequent living conditions upon their arrival were notably difficult. Around 15,000 Jews from Cernăuți and further 5,000 from elsewhere in Bukovina were saved by the then-mayor of the city Traian Popovici. Nevertheless, he was not able to save everyone, and some 43,798 Bukovinian Jews were deported to, and arrived in, Transnistria. At the end of the war, the remaining Jewish community of Bukovina decided to move to Israel.
As a result of the departure of the Romanian intellectuals in 1940 and 1944, of the Bukovinian Germans in 1940–41, of the surviving Bukovinian Jews in 1945, and of the forceful repatriation of Bukovinian Polish to Poland, Cernăuți, one of the cultural and university "jewels" of Austria-Hungary and Romania ceased to exist as such: its population being greatly reduced. After the war, some Bukovinian Ukrainians from the countryside, as well as a few Ukrainians from Podolia and Galicia moved to the city. However, they were generally excluded from the Soviet apparatus and higher positions in the economy and administration, which was formed mostly by people known to be loyal to the Soviet system sent from eastern Ukraine or from other parts of the USSR.