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The Jewish community, initially known as the “Jewish gild” (breasla jidovească), had the role of organising the spiritual and economical life of its members. This also had a political role and one of legal representative
The Jewish population organised into gilds, according to their trades. The richer ones were connected to princes or boyars to whom they lend money. In 1666 the function of Haham Basa appeared, the spiritual leader of the community (abolished in 1834), the secular leader being the Great Head, Rosh Medina (“the city head”). The Rabbi was at the head of the community, being a judge and supervisor of the House of Marriages. The taxation policy, the gabela, appears, from which the debts to the Ruling were paid, and the rest was used for the maintenance of institutions and the poor. The Jewish community of Iași reached in 1859 almost 50% of the city’s population. The modern hospital, schools and helping institutions for the poor were founded. In 1863, gabela was abolished, schools were closed and the community attributes and the institutions were transferred to the Israeli hospital, with a separate legal personality. After 1919, due to the difficulties in which the community’s institutions were situated, its reorganisation was decided. The Jewish Community in Romania was recognised as a public organism only in 1927, after applying the Constitution of 1923, which gave citizenship rights to all ethnicities in Romania.
The inauguration of a museum dedicated to the contribution of Jews to the life of Iași took place in 1986, in the Grand Synagogue. The synagogue’s restoration determined moving the museum in 2011 in the today’s Community residence, in the building also called “The five roads house”. In the museum there are exhibited Judaic religious objects characteristic to the rituals of the main holidays in the Judaic calendar: Shabbat (each Saturday), Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year, September – October), Simchat Torah (The Joy of receiving the Torah, October), Hanukah (The Holiday of Light, November – December), Purim (the freeing of the Jewish people under the Persian-Babylonian empire in 427 B.C., March) and Pesach (Jewish Easter – the holiday of the freeing of Jewish under the Egyptian ruling, March – April). An adorned canopy, placed in the centre, reminds us of the Jewish marriages. The exhibition regroups articles, magazines, old photographs, posters and books of Jewish authors in Iași.
Since 2002, the centre supports a club which coordinates the Ritual restaurant, with kosher foods, according to the kashrut norms, the chair and a traditional music band. It is actively implicated into the cultural life, organizes shows, conferences, commemorations and film watching. Today, the Jewish community of Iași numbers almost 300 persons, most of them coming from mixt families.
Visiting hours for the museum: 09:00-14:00 (the identity card is required).
Cătălin Mihuleac – “Fondane’s Last Cigarette”
The contemporary writer Cătălin Mihuleac, born in Iași, affirmed himself through novels, theatre plays and a prodigious publicistic activity. In 2014, he publishes the novel “America after the Pogrom”, an important book in the Romanian literature which treats without dodging the infamous Pogrom of Iași in June 1941. The next volume, “Fondane’s Last Cigarette” (2016) invokes the life of Benjamin Fondane, a remarkable Jewish writer and poet (Romanian-French), born in Iași and exterminated in Auschwitz. This volume of micro-novels was played on stage in 2015, in a play in an experimental theatre where the video projections, the epoch music and the unconventional space with a symbolic meaning (the Tram Depot in Iași), recreated a tragical historical moment.
10. Ancienne Hôpital Juive – Hôpital «Princesse Elena»