Michel Foucault – remaking history

- The Archeology of Knowledge -



The Archaeology of Knowledge was Foucault’s methodological attempt to clarify some concepts used more or less implicitly in his earlier works such as The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963) and The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966). The book was written in Tunis, where Foucault asked to be deployed for the period of his boyfriend’s military service. From the very first paragraph the author challenges the classical view of making history:
“For many years now historians have preferred to turn their attention to long periods, as if, beneath the shifts and changes of events, they were trying to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the irreversible processes, the constants, the underlying tendencies that gather force (…), the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events.” [1]
For these historians, events are only the parts of a big puzzle whose image is already given, the single worthwhile task being the rearrangement of facts according to the model. He offers a new kind of approach in which the status of the historical event must be inverted. Foucault tries to re-focalize the attention from the long periods of time characterized by continuity and causality to the shifts and changes that suddenly appear and have apparently no explanation. It seems that the historians’ mission was to identify and eliminate everything that contradicts their suppositions:
“The great problem of the classic historical analysis is how continuities are established, how a single pattern is formed and preserved, how there is a single horizon for so many different, successive minds.” [2]
It is exactly in this perspective that Foucault wants to engage. The important problem is for him no longer that of how a tradition is imposed, or that of tracing a line of continuity between disparate events, but “one of divisions and transformations that dissolves the continuous lines and serve as new foundations”. The old question of traditional history (“how can a causal succession be established between disparate events?”) must give place to a completely different set of questions that can allow different perspectives to the same line of events (the possibility of writing two completely different histories for the same event etc.).
Foucault remarks that in disciplines like the history of ideas, the history of science, the history of philosophy, the history of thought and the history of literature, attention was already being turned away from vast unities like ”periods” or “centuries” to the phenomena of rupture and discontinuity. History must also go forward and adapt itself to the epistemological mutation that emerged in the humanities. He originates these long-term changes in Marx, Freud and Nietzsche’s operas. Foucault tries to attenuate the singularity of his attempt by mentioning previous research on the theme of discontinuity. He invokes Bachelard’s epistemological acts of threshold (which “suspend the continuous accumulation of knowledge, interrupt its slow development, and force it to enter a new time”) and Ganguilhem’s distinction between the microscopical and the macroscopical scales of history in which “events and their consequences are not arranged in the same way, (…) on each of the two levels, a different history being written”.
On a careful examination – without any ideological perspective [3] – history will reveal several pasts, several hierarchies of importance, several teleologies, all for one and the same situation. Awareness of the absence of a singular causal chain (that guaranties historical continuity) and the possibility of conceiving some parallel coherent histories on different levels of analysis are what engaged Foucault in this ambitious attempt to develop a new archaeological theory of history. The critical point from where the new questioning begins is the document:
“Ever since history has existed, documents have been used, questioned, and have given rise to questions: the questions were whether the documents meant something, whether they were telling the truth, and by what right they could claim to be doing so. All these questions pointing to the same end: the reconstruction of the past from which they emanate.” [4]
Now, history must change its position concerning the document. It must take as its primary task not the interpretation of the document or the attempt to decide whether it is telling the truth, but that of working with it from within and developing it:
“The document is no longer for history an inert material through which it tries to reconstitute what men have done or said, the events of which only the trace remains; history is now trying to define within the document itself unities, totalities, relations, series.” [5]
The researcher must set himself free from the anthropological justification of history as “an age-old collective-consciousness that made use of material documents to refresh his memory”. This and other metaphysical postulates must be, as much as possible, limited if not eliminated. History, in its traditional form, undertook to memorizing monuments of the past, and to transforming them into documents of the past. Now the task is that of transforming documents into monuments. If, in the classical view, archaeology aspired to the condition of history, from now on history must aspire to the condition of archaeology, to the intrinsic description of the document.
This change of rapports has some consequences. The first is the proliferation of discontinuities within history. Instead of a continuous chronology of ration, traced back to some inaccessible origin, there have appeared scales irreducible to a single law, which bear the types of history peculiar to each one and cannot be reduced to the general model of a consciousness that acquires progress and remembrance [6]. If, until recently, discontinuities were the raw material which, through analysis, hat to be rearranged in order to reveal the continuity of events, from now on they become one of the basic elements of historical analysis.
“Traditionally discontinuity was the historian’s task to remove from history. Now it constitutes a deliberate operation on the part of historian, not only a quality of the material. It is also the result of his description, and not something that must be eliminated by the means of his analysis. In short, the discontinuities are transferred from the obstacles of the work into the work itself.” [7]
The new concept of interpreting history is confronted with a number of methodological problems: the establishment of a coherent and homogenous corpus of documents, the establishment of a principle of choice, the specification of a method of analysis, the delimitations of groups and subgroups that articulate the material etc.
Another consequence of the archaeological turn is that the theme and the possibility of a total history begin to disappear, giving place to a new kind of history: a “general history” in Foucaultian terms. A total history seeks to reconstitute the general form of a civilization, the material or spiritual principle of a society, the common meaning of a phenomenon from a period, the law that accounts for their cohesion [8]. It supposes that the same form of historicity operates upon economic structures, social institutions and customs, political behavior and the development of new technologies. These unifying postulates are challenged by new notions – like series, divisions, shifts, limits, differences of level, chronological specifications etc. – proper to Foucault’s archaeological project.
“A general history tries to determine what form of relation may legitimately be described between different series of events (…). A total description draws all phenomena around a single centre – a principle, a meaning, a spirit, a world-view, an overall shape. A general history would deploy the space of a dispersion.” [9]
Continuous history – says Foucault – is the indispensable correlative of the founding function of the subject, the guarantee that everything that has eluded him can be restored, the promise that one day the subject (in the form of a historical consciousness) will be able to appropriate all those things that are kept away from him. In his systematic refusal to take the subject, be it empirical or transcendental, as a starting point for his analysis, Foucault adopted a resolutely anti-humanist problematic, though he still used to search for an a priori for knowledge [10]. The subject became a “vacant place that may in fact be filled by different individuals” [11].
Foucault also operated a drastic modification on the usual concept of historical time. Instead of a linear and totalizable time, he came up with a stratification, a dispersion of the series of events. The Archaeology of science tried to simultaneously undermine transcendental consciousness and traditional historical time.
Against the a-historical character of the Kantian a priori, and the trans-historicality of its Husserl equivalent, Foucault proposes the paradoxical hypothesis of an a priori fully given in history, which transforms itself with it. Technically, the term “historical a priori” is contradictory because history is the space where experience is given, constituting the very possibility of the a posteriori to exist and to manifest itself. On the other hand, the a priori is the a-historical ‘place’ where the transcendental subject can be founded. Transcendentalism is what Foucault tries to elude.
Foucault’s critique of transcendentalism is twofold. Firstly, it implies denunciation of the anthropological illusions that chained the thought of modernity and, secondly, it tries to find a valid answer to the problem of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge, based on a historical a priori. His search for a non-anthropological foundation is very similar to the phenomenological attempt at finding a solution to exceed transcendentalism (the transcendental ego and the a priori).  
Foucault makes a distinction between a centred subject and a decentered one. In the  nineteenth century anthropology and humanism tried to preserve the sovereignity of the subject against the decentration first operated by Marx (relations of production, class struggle etc.), then by Nietzsche (his genealogy). More recently, the research of psychoanalysis, linguistics and ethnology have decentered the subject in relation to the laws of his desire, the forms of his language and his mythical discourse [12]. These kinds of things cannot be explained by means of historical consciousness. We now have an eclipse of that form of a total history that was secretly, but entirely related to the synthetic activity of the subject (an ideological form of history).
Given the novelty of his project, some attempted to place him within the frames of structuralism, de-constructivism or the postmodernist trend. Foucault rejected all classifications. He was initially happy to go along with the structuralist description, but later emphasised his distance from this approach, arguing that unlike the structuralists he did not adopted a formalist approach. However, wherever the structuralists searched for homogeneity in a discursive entity, Foucault focused on differences. He also had to argue with Derrida, with whom he ceased to communicate after some theoretical disagreements. Neither was he interested in having the postmodern label applied to his own work, saying he preferred to discuss how 'modernity' was defined.
Conceived primarily as archaeology, history must deliver itself from a huge mass of notions, all linked with the theme of continuity. The most important are the notions of tradition, influence, development and evolution, and that of spirit. The notion of tradition is intended to give “a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical”. It makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of causality, allowing a reduction of the differences proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for the origin.
The second notion is that of influence, which provides a support for the facts of transmission, justifying an apparently causal process (but with neither rigorous delimitation nor theoretical definition) with the help of other two subordinate notions: resemblance and repetition.
The notions of development and evolution fall into third place. They create the possibility of grouping a succession of dispersed events, of linking them under the same organising principle, of discovering a principle of coherence and of outlining a future unity.
The last notion is that of spirit, which enables us to establish a community of meanings, symbolic links and resemblances between the simultaneous or successive phenomena of a given period. This notion allows for the sovereignty of collective consciousness to emerge as the principle of unity and explanation.
All these concepts are ready-made syntheses, groupings that we normally accept before any examination. We must question those divisions or groupings with which we have become so familiar. For example, categories like ‘literature’ and ‘politics’ are quite recent. They can be applied to medieval or classical culture only as retrospective hypotheses and by some formal analogies; but neither literature nor politics, neither philosophy nor the sciences did articulate the field of discourse in the seventeenth or eighteenth century as they did in the nineteenth century. In any case, these divisions are always reflexive categories, principles of classification, normative rules, and institutionalised types.
There are a number of units that are configured with the help of these and some other similar notions, but the unities that must be suspended above all are those of ‘author’, ‘book’ and ‘œuvre’.
The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences. The ‘book’ is only a node within a network. It is not simply the object that one holds in his hands; and it cannot remain within the little parallelepiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as someone questions that unity, it blurs its self-evidence; it indicates and constructs itself only on the basis of a complex field-of-discourse. The only strong identity of a book is its material support. Beyond it we lose the coherence of a theme or of a single voice. Fragments from several books can be more coherent one with the other than fragments from a single book.
The problems raised by the œuvre are even more difficult. How can we designate the name of a single author to  a collection of texts? And the designatory function is not a homogeneous one. The establishment of a complete oeuvre implies a number of choices difficult to justify. What status should be given to the letters and notes left by the author? How about private conversations recorded by those present at the time, in short, the vast mass of verbal traces left by an author at his death? Could we associate the authorial function with these verbal and conversational traces? The œuvre – says Foucault - can be regarded neither as an immediate unity, nor as a certain unity, nor as a homogeneous unity.
The last and the most complex unit that Foucault tried to disaggregate is the author. In dealing with the author, we must consider the characteristics of a discourse that support this use and determine its differences from other discourses.
In the first place, books are objects of appropriation. Speeches and books were assigned to real persons only when the author became subject to punishment and to the extent that his discourse was considered transgressive. In our culture and undoubtedly in others as well discourse was not originally a product or a possession, but an action. It was first a gesture of communication before it became a possession caught up in a circuit of property values [13]. The notion of author appeared on a large scale in Europe mostly after the establishment of the catholic index nominorum, and only with the scope of identifying and controling pernicious texts and, subsequently, their authors.
The authorial-function is not constitutive to any discourse. Not even in the European civilization were the same types of texts always linked with an author. There was a time when literary texts (stories, folk tales, epics and tragedies) were accepted, circulated and valued regardless of the identity of their author. In the Middle Ages it was only the so-called ‘scientific’ texts that needed validation by specifying the name of the author. The name of an author was a proof for the veracity of a given discourse.
A completely new conception developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: scientific texts came to be accepted on their own merits. The proof of veracity was founded on an anonymous and coherent conceptual system of established truths and methods of verification.
“Authentication no longer required reference to the individual who had produced them; the role of the author as an index of truthfulness disappeared and, wherever it remained as the inventor's name, it was merely to denote a specific theorem or proposition, a strange effect, a property, a body, a group of elements or a pathological syndrome. At the same time, however, "literary" discourse was only acceptable if it carried an author's name; every poetical or fictional text was obliged to state its author and then the date, place, and circumstances of its writing.” [14]
A last theme that must be clarified is Foucault’s concept of discursive formation. In his attempt at giving this notion a description he formulated many hypotheses (only to reject them afterwards). The first hypothesis is that statements different in form and dispersed in time form a group when they refer to one and the same object. The second hypothesis on making up a discursive formation meant defining a group of relations between statements, one which was based on their form and the type of connection between them. The third hypothesis was based on the possibility of establishing groups of statements by determining the system of permanent and coherent concepts involved. For example, the Classical analysis of language and grammatical facts rested on a definite number of concepts whose content and usage had been established once and for all. Some of these concepts were judgement (defined as the general, normative form of any sentence), the subject and the predicate, the noun and the verb etc.
Some authors identify the early concept of ‘episteme’, used by Foucault in The order of Things, with the notion of discursive formation. The large groups of statements that configure medicine, economics and grammar, studied before as different epistemes, are actually discursive formations. A discursive formation – in Foucault’s terms – “is the totality of relations that can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities” [15].
The premise of his archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations) are governed by rules beyond those of grammar and logic, operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determine the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period. The archeologist’s concern is to uncover the ‘rules of formation’ that govern these configurations of knowledge and to highlight the epistemological breaks that mark the movement from one episteme to another [16]. In Kantian terms, an episteme is the historical a priori which makes certain forms of knowledge become possible.
There are some similarities between modern physics and Foucault’s archeology, as Pamela Major-Poetzl has revealed. Foucault himself did not claim to be adapting the theory of relativity to the study of cultural phenomena. Nonetheless, there is a big similarity between archaeology and field theory. Einstein´s field theory has shifted the attention from things (particles) and abstract forces (charges and gravity) to the structure of space itself. Like field theory, archaeology has shifted the attention from things (objects) and abstract forces (ideas) to the structure of "discourses" (organized bodies of knowledge and practice, such as clinical medicine) in their specific spatio-temporal articulations [17]. Like Einstein, Foucalt was not able to entirely eliminate the concept of things and build a theory of pure relations, but he was able to relativize "words" and "things" and to formulate rules describing epistemological fields. However, while Einstein's theories rest on a firm basis of mathematical proof in addition to extensive experimental verification, Foucault has no such mathematical language at his disposal. He is forced to use words, words that he must pull out of their accustomed meanings and put into a new series of relationships.
The fundamental entity of discourse is the statement. But statements do not indicate “things”, “facts”, “realities” or “beings”, but laws of possibility, rules of existence. No one can “find structural criteria of unity for the statement (…) because it is not in itself a unit, but a function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities and witch reveals them, with concrete contents in time and space” [18].
The chronology of Foucault´s major works was interrupted by two periods of silence of five and eight years respectively, at the end of which Foucault had changed his previous methods. Archaeology was thus being followed by genealogy and that in its turn was being followed by the study of the “techniques of the self”. Asked whether he was being inconsequent when periodically changing his vision and his methods, Foucault answered that he could not hold the same vision after years and years of studies. He never pretended to possess any eternal truths about anything. Nevertheless, the most appropriate characteristic of his life and work is the development of a technique of the self.

Notes:

[1] Foucault, Michel: The Archaeology of Knowledge, Pantheon Books, New York, 1972, p. 3.
[2] Ibidem, p. 5.
[3] History, says Foucault, must detach itself from “the ideology of its past and reveal this past as ideological”, ibidem, p. 5.
[4] Ibidem, p. 6.
[5] Ibidem, p. 7.
[6] Ibidem, p. 8.
[7] Ibidem, p. 9.
[8] Idem, ibidem.
[9] Ibidem, p. 10.
[10] Beatrice Han: Foucault’s Critical Project. Between the Transcendental and the Historical, Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 4.
[11] Major-Poetzl, Pamela: Michel  Foucault’s  Archaeology  of  Western  Culture, North Carolina University Press, 1983, p. 5.
[12] Foucault: quoted work, p. 13.
[13] Foucault, Michel: What is an Author?, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Ed. D. F. Bouchard, Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1977, pp.124-127.
[14] Ibidem.
[15] Foucault, Michel: The Archeology…, p. 191.
[16] Owen, David: Maturity and Modernity. Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason, Routledge, New York, 1994, p. 144.
[17] Major-Poetzl, Pamela: quoted work, p. 5.
[18] Ibidem, p. 24.

Ştefãneşti – a source of tradition and a memorial

The town of Ştefãneşti is located in the eastern part of the present-day Botoşani County, in the Prut and Başeu river valleys. The history of the place has been marked by a considerable number of invasions, destroyed and rebuilt time and again. The last such destruction, preceded by the evacuation of the Jewish population by the Romanian authorities, happened during World War II. It seems that history couldn’t have provided a better place for a Jewish community. This community from Ştefãneşti has come to symbolize, in a paradigmatic manner, the Jewish condition.
It is not yet very clear when Ştefãneşti became a town. What we know for sure is the fact that is the Pole Jan Dlugosz (1415 – 1480), one of the first to testify to the existence of the town in his chronicle Annales seu cronicae incliti regni Polnia , writes about the ‘villa Stepanowcze’/the village of Ştefãneşti, as being somewhere next to the source of the river Başeu, in the valley crossed by an important commercial route that led to his country.
Another author mentioning this town is Balthasar de Piscia. While in Suceava, he wrote on September 16th 1476 about the Tartars who ‘fell upon the town of Ştefaneşti’ . Between Dlugosz’ chronicle and Balthasar de Piscia’s, Ştefãneşti seems to have evolved to the rank of market town. During this same period of urbanization Ştefãneşti is targeted by its first invasions. The market town underwent a strong economic development, favoured by its special geographical position.


Commercial roads crossing Ştefãneşti

We shall present some of the historical names of the roads that intersected at Ştefãneşti. The first is the ‘Thieves’ Road’ , attested in 1492, beginning in southern Iaşi, and going along the Başeu Valley up to Lipscani. Today the name of Lipscani doesn’t say much, but in the past the town had great significance. The merchants of Lipsca (Leipzig) had sent their envoys here – they were known as ‘lipscani’, whereby the name of the place. On the one hand, the term fur(-i) is the medieval equivalent of the contemporary term ‘thief (ves)’. The roads from the Romanian Principalities in the 16th and 17th centuries were very unsafe, as rabbinical texts (response)  and foreign travellers' testimonies on the Principalities abounded in stories of crimes committed by robbers and, very often, by the ‘people in the service of the ruler’  themselves. Many of these rabbinical texts with regard to the principalities referred to problems of agunot, that is to the situations when Jewish women asked  rabbinical courts to free them of any marital obligations, after their husband’s death or long disappearance (who was thus supposed to be dead), in order to be able to get married again. The frequency with which agunot situations happened in the Romanian principalities as well as the presence of some terms connected to thieving methods, present even in the name of some commercial roads, certify that the respective routes were totally unsafe. On the other hand, the fact that these texts were requested by some rabbinical courts from Poland, confirms that there weren’t any strong Jewish communities in Moldavia to support rabbis and well-known rabbinical courts.
The second commercial route was ‘Soroca road’, crossing the area from the eastern to the western part. On this route there took place a majority of the invasions hitting Moldavia from the East in the 16th and 17th centuries, generally having as protagonists the Tartars and the Cossacks. Details regarding these invasions will be dealt with in the part about the military history of Ştefãneşti.
The third important commercial route was ‘Hotin Road’, sometimes called ‘Drumul Camenitei’, linking Lemberg, Camenita, Hotin, Iaşi and Galaţi. This road was located on the North-South axis, along the larger one from The Black Sea to the The Baltic Sea. It seems the road had been ‘opened to traffic’ by a treaty between Alexandru cel Bun and the merchants of Lemberg on October 8th 1408.
Consequently, the fact that these commercial routes were called ‘şleahuri’ (a Polish word in origin) is not without relevance. They certify an important influx of Polish merchants. It is worth remembering that Ashkenazi Jews also traveled with the Poles. This reality certainly results from the corroboration of a couple of documents. The first belongs to the Electorate from Branderburg. Accordingly, in the summer of 1546 the king of Poland complained to  sovereign Petru Rareş about ‘merchants not being able to trade in Moldavia anymore and the latter’s standing in the way to Turkey, since they were robbed, thrown into prison or even killed at your highness’ order.’  We know that this is about Jewish merchants, not (necessarily) Christians, from a Jewish source (responsa) dated a year earlier. In Rabi Ioel Sirkis’s work Responsae Bait Hadas, on the 83rd answer from the 23rd of Tevet 5305 (1545), there is a testimony (in Yiddish) sent to the rabbinic court in Mezibuj, regarding the murder of a number of Jews, at the order of the ‘ruler of Moldavia’.
The existence of such practices is strengthened by a document issued by the Cancelary of Sigismund August in 1545, Lithuania. In it he complained to Moldavian envoys about ‘the Turkish, Armenian and Jewish traders who came to His Royal Highness in Lithuania with their goods, complaining that every time they brought with them fine horses from Turkey to sell in Poland and His Highness took those horses from them and didn’t let them to be taken to Poland’.  It seems that the second reign of Petru Rareş (1541-1546) abounded in incidents associated with trading caravans crossing Moldavia.
These external trading routes going through Ştefãneşti were not only subject to plunder and abuse from the authorities. There is a document referring to the beginning of the 17th century, issued by Ştefan Tomsa’s Cancelary in Iaşi, on December 10th, 1613, in Polish, which allowed the ‘Polish people, be they ethnic Poles, Armenians or Jews, to carry their goods on the roads to Cernauti, Hotin and Soroca but not elsewhere, to avoid losing their merchandise’.  This record issued by ruler Ştefan Tomşa not only mentioned the Jews as traders but also the guaranteeing of free travel and protection of the trading caravans crossing Moldavia from the North to the East.

The last medieval commercial road going through Ştefãneşti is ‘Botoşani Road’. Moreover, associated with this route’s name, there is one of the first attestations of Jewish merchants present in Ştefãneşti in the first years of the Cossacks rebellion. At this time, a group of Jews chose to leave Ştefãneşti to go to Botoşani, under the pressure of an imminent arrival of Bogdan Hmelnitski’s armies.
It is important to mention that the ‘Thieves’ Road’ as well as the ‘Botoşani Road’ were internal routes, the former being the route of dissemination of goods from Central Europe (Leipzig) to Moldavia, while the later represented a route used to collect Moldavian goods (grain, livestock, skins) for export.

The development of the town gained a lot especially when Iaşi became the capital of Moldavia, Ştefãneşti rising as an important stop on the route Lemberg-Cameniţa-Hotin-Iaşi-Galaţi, one that was part of the commercial road linking The Black Sea and The Baltic Sea, as we have pointed out. In 1520, 1598 and 1620 we are told about some floating bridges, lying on the property of some boyars. In 1630 we have the first attestation of a bridge made of stone, in the vicinity of the sovereign, linking the ‘Soroca Road’ with the ‘Botoşani Road’.
We know that in Petru Şchiopu’s time, in 1591, there could be found in Ştefãneşti a princely mill as well as a few other mills located south of the place.  As to the religious life of the town, the deacon Trifan Korobeinicov from Moscow attests the existence of three churches in 1593. The presence of craftsmen is mentioned in a document dated on March 15th, about a person called ‘Avram Meserciul’.  This name, as well as the presence in the proximity of a village called Avrãmeni (the toponym meaning ‘those of Avram, his descendants’) represents a testimony to the Jews in the area, as well as the fact, that they might have lived segregated. Nowadays we cannot find any town near Ştefãneşti called Avrãmeni, a fact which supports the hypothesis that that place was more of a ghetto within the town or, at most, a town situated in the immediate proximity, mainly populated by Jews, who was then swallowed up by the town’s expansion. The toponym ‘Braharie’  as well as the existence of a deed in the second half of the 17th century mentioning a certain ‘Alecsi the brewer, from Ştefãneşti’ indicates the presence of some breweries.
Ştefãneşti also appears on a series of maps dated from that period, a fact which confirms its importance. Thus, in the year 1550, the market town is represented on the map conceived by G. Reichersdorff by means of three turrets  - ‘a privilege’ only few localities benefited from. Also, it is being mentioned on a map of Europe from 1579, and on the map belonging to Domenicos Custos from 1596, there appears bearing the name of Stepanutze. In the year 1600 it is noted among those ‘oppida notabiliora’  from Moldavia, altogether with Botoşani, Roman, Bacău, Bîrlad, Tecuci and Hîrlău.
As to a possible first Jewish habitation in the central area of Moldavia, on Hotin Road, which comprised Iaşi and Ştefãneşti, M.A. Halevy suggests as a possible date, the year 1540, taking into account Martin Bielski’s Kronika Polska, where the later mentioned a number of ‘Proselyte Jews from Poland’, that is Poles converted to Judaism, who sought refuge from persecutions in Moldavia.  Apart from the responsae and other random texts, unfortunately there are not many documents referring to the existence of Jews and their activities in Moldavia. In the 16th and 17th centuries there were no censuses. The first official demographic statistics appeared later on, in 1774 and they only referred to the number tax-payers.


Details regarding the military history of the area

Nevertheless, we can conclude that Ştefãneşti went through a certain commercial and craftsmanship development, between the 16th and the 17th centuries, even though it’s geographically favorable position to commerce was at the same time the source of the majority of the misfortunes befalling the town. According to the chronicles, Ştefãneşti is one of the most invaded localities in Moldavia. Almost all the invasions from the East had Ştefãneşti as central point when crossing the river Prut while the fast incursions of the Tartars used mostly Şleahul Sorocei, also called the Tartar’s Road.
In June 1476, when the ruler Ştefan Cel Mare/Stephen the Great had his armies in southern Moldavia, trying to stop the invasion of Mohamed II, ‘the Tartars invaded the town of Ştefãneşti and seized many notabilities of the town.’  In September and October 1506 and in June 1509 the town was plundered by the Poles. A year later, in April-May 1510 the Tartars come again  only to return in 1513, when the armies lead by Beti Ghirai, the Khan’s son, burned out Iaşi, Ştefãneşti and Dorohoi.  In 1518, the Tartars lead by the Khan Albu attacked again ‘Soroca Road’ in Ştefãneşti, where they were taken by surprise and defeated by the army of Ştefan cel Tanar/Stephen the Young, on August 9th. Twenty years later, in 1538, the Tartars tried to cross the river Prut again, at Ştefãneşti, but they were defeated by Petru Rareş’s forces.  In 1572 there was a fight between Bogdan Lăpuşneanu’s armies, supported by the Poles and ruler Ion Vodă’s forces. On September 1st 1595, the Polish army of the Cossacks’ leader, Zamoyski, proclaimed Ieremia Movilă ruler at Ştefăneşti, not before burning down the town. Between December 16th and December 19th 1607 a great battle took place between Constantin Movilă, supported by the Poles, and his cousin, ruler Mihai Movilă. In 1616, Ştefan Tomşa, with the help of the Turks and of the Tartars, destroyed there an army of Polish and French mercenaries. In 1650 a Tartar-Cossack raid burned down the town again. In three years’ time Gheorghe Ştefan’s army mobilized to help the Poles against Timus Hmelniţki’s Cossacks. The latter surrendered in Suceava even before anything was set against them.  We also know that in 1686 and 1691 Jan Sobieski’s armies made a halt in Ştefăneşti, during their anti-Ottomans campaigns.   


The Town’s Condition during the 17th Century

The 17th century brought great changes into this town, due especially to the turmoil from Ukraine. If in 1612 Tomasso Alberti depicted Ştefăneşti as a large town with 2000 houses, a fact which made Romanian historian Constantin C. Giurescu state that the place had a population of 10000 inhabitants, in 1657 the Swede Conrad Iacob Hiltebrandt notes that ‘the town was ruined to a great extent’ and that ‘it was crammed with Jewish refugees’.  In 1684, in Poema polona Miron Costin calls the place town (miasto), a sign that Ştefãneşti had been rebuilt after its previous demolitions. The Jews’ migration towards Moldavia – cited also by Hiltebrandt – can be explained by the annexation of the Eastern part of Ukraine by Russia as well as by the persecution lead by Bogdan Hmelniţki’s Cossaks (1595-1657), during that time.
Hmelniţki was the leader of the Cossacks and of the Ukrainian peasants’ uprising against the Poles in 1648. A year before, he had fled from the Polish area (where he had been imprisoned) to find refuge at the Cossacks on the Nipru river (in Zaporozhye). He formed an alliance with the Tartars in Crimea, obtaining a series of military successes against Poland. In 1654 he subdued the territories he had taken over to Russia, after he had considered Ottoman and Swedish sovereignty. The rebellions east of the river Nistru had a great impact on Moldavia at the time, due to the Cossack-Tartar invasions as well as to the Jews’ migration.
A testimony to Moldova’s condition at that moment, in the second half of the 17th century, is given by Paul de Alep.  He succeeds in drawing the picture of an interesting fresco of the age, referring to Jews, Cossacks, Moldavians, Greeks and Turks. ‘Meanwhile a great misfortune had fallen upon the Turks and the Jews, and so the Cossacks tortured and plundered them (…); and maybe the Moldavians themselves went through a lot more. As for the Jews, they were put in prison and tortured night after night, as we are told, to bring their wealth to light.’
In conclusion, one of the reasons behind the Cossacks’ actions against the Jews (and not only) was simply plunder and swindle. As to the Moldavians’ attitude regarding other minorities, we consider the relevance of the next excerpt: ‘Muslims and Jews appeared in public fearlessly, while Greeks didn’t have the courage to leave their houses, because of the great resentment between them and the inhabitants.’  This text is somehow unquestionably characteristic to the Phanariot epoch.
Paul de Alep tells that almost the entire Moldavian trade was in the hands of the Jews in the middle of the 17th century, who had expanded their commercial relations as far as Germany. They exported mainly agricultural products and imported fabrics and silks. The Jews also initiated the jewellery trade, and remained the only ones in it. Paul de Alep also mentions that the Jews were bankers, money changers and sellers of alcoholic liquors, and their number wasn’t higher than 12000 souls.


Jewish sources regarding Ştefãneşti

As to the Jewish sources explicitly referring to Ştefãneşti in the 17th century, there is a attestation by Rabi Meir Ghedalia from Lublin which appeared in Venice in 1618. The work contains a few testimonies from the rabbinic court in Bar, in 1613, sent to the court in Lublin. The witness Ithac ben Mordechai states: ‘I have been to Wallachia (Moldavia) in the town of Ştefãneşti and there was a Jew from Bar who pointed out to me the murderer who drowned two Jews from Priluk, one of them being the official Zalman (…)’.  This testimony, corroborated with the deed from 1614, which certified the presence of a character called ‘Avram Meserciul’ in Ştefãneşti, as well as with the existence of toponyms like Avrãmeni, confirms without doubt that there was a Jewish presence in this town, at least at the beginning of the 17th century. We can thus speak of four centuries of uninterrupted Jewish presence in Ştefăneşti.
A second attestation of Ştefãneşti from Jewish sources is found in a work by Rabi Ioel Serkis who, in his work Bait Hadas (Questions and answers), comprising documents from 1600-1640, presents the story of Iosef bar Semuel regarding Bogdan Hmelnitski’s offensive in Moldova. ‘I went to Wallachia (Moldova) with Haim Ithak bar Selomo’s son-in-low from Crasni to an inn in Ştefãneşti at the moment of Hmil (Bogdan Hmelnitski)’s terror. Here we got very scared and went to the Hospodar (the ruler) and his Wallachian and Polish people, who were in the field half a mile away from Botoşani (…)’.
We can conclude from this fragment that a number of Jewish traders had been taken by surprise by Bogdan Hmelnitski’s army while they were on the ‘internal’ route Tg. Frumos (Crasna) – Ştefãneşti – Botoşani. At the same time we find out that in 1640 (most probably, as it is the superior limit of book’s chronology) there lived in Tg. Frumos at least one Jewish family involved in trade.


The socio-economic context of the Jewish colonizations in Moldavia during the 16th and the 17th centuries

The Jewish sources referring to the 16th and 17th centuries consist in their majority of rabbinical texts with regards to the cases of disappearance of Jewish merchants while on journey along Moldavia’s roads. This fact proves the extent to which these trading routes were unsafe in this country. Foreign tradesmen were either plundered by brigands or by the authorities themselves. The economic difficulty of the principalities was, sometimes, the one that pushed the rulers into taking such measures. As in the former case of the western countries (England, France, Spain, etc.), the rulers who had borrowed money from Jewish usurers preferred to have them killed than pay their debts. The most known case in this direction is Mihai Viteazu’s deed in 1593. This is what Marco Vinieri, the envoy of the Dodge of Venice to the Romanian ruler’s court, states on 29th November 1593: ‘The ruler gathered up all his creditors, Turks, Greeks, Jews and others, asked for their deeds and had them killed by his guards’ swords, who had prepared themselves on time for this purpose.’  The same event is mentioned by Baltazar Walter from Silezia, who placed the event on November 13th 1593: ‘ac more sidi propria dedetis simper Hebraeis omnibus’ , mentioning the fact that the Jews behaved with dignity, as they were accustomed to. This action was emulated in Moldavia by Aron Vodă, who killed 19 Sephardic Jews, altogether with the rest of the Turks from Iaşi in 1594.  It seems that the ruler had accumulated debts having a total value of one million ducats, a sum which could not be an exaggeration, if we take into account the debts accumulated by the ruler.
But there had never been mass evictions of the Jews or any anti-Semitic rhetoric supported by the church or any other groups having interests in it, which should exert any political pressure on the political authority with regards to the Jews. It seems that Petru Şchiopu, by means of a letter he sent on the 8th of January 1579, had announced ‘the eviction of the Jews’  from Moldavia, but the document actually refers only to the Jewish-Galitian cattle sellers who avoided the Moldavian fairs which took place in the bordering areas in order to enter the country, where they were buying their stuff directly from peasants and boyars, thus avoiding the taxes imposed by the rulers. This was not a discriminating sanction, as it only aimed at a category of Jews, hence being rather a protective one, according to the meaning that we have nowadays for the term. Instigations and murders on a religious background do not appear until the 18th century, especially in the Galaţi harbour, mainly in the period of the Christian Orthodox Easter, when the majority of sources agree when it comes to attributing these manifestations to the envy of the Greek town sellers against their Jewish competitors.
There had never been a situation in which the oppressed masses revolted against the ‘oppressive’ Jews or the oppressors’ representatives, as in the case of the uprising of the Ukrainian bondmen led by Hmelniţki against the Polish landowners and the Jewish leaseholders who represented them. This fact was due to the relatively low number of Jews present in Moldavia, in the 16th century.
In the 17th and 18th centuries there are, on the contrary, many documents stating that either the ruler (the state) or some boyars are to give remissions to the Galitian Jews, who wanted to establish new market towns or to settle down in towns already existing, in order to encourage commerce and craftsmanship.
Although the 16th century was marked by a critical political instability which generated a certain uncertainty on commercial routes, the plunder – committed by rascals or the authorities – didn’t represent the main characteristic of the Moldavian trade system. We know that there were many villages that disappeared, the villagers seeking refuge, as a consequence to crimes against the Jews, committed by either the inhabitants or the rascals. The identification of a dead Jew on the property of a village was punished very harshly, so the peasants usually tried to hide any incriminatory objects. They either moved the body or buried it. Such situations and investigations lead by the authorities are mentioned in the rabbinical texts, in the excerpts dealing with the agunot.
In cases where villagers were found guilty of killing a Jew (if the inhabitants had killed him, with the purpose of taking his goods, or he had been found on the village’s land), the people received an important fine, called dasegubină  which usually consisted in confiscating the people’s livestock. If they refused to give them away, the inhabitants were banished and their houses demolished. We know that such a fine was given to the village of Băguleşti in 1654, leading to many disputes between the peasants.  Nowadays this village doesn’t exist anymore. Another case is to be found in Muntenia, where Mircea Ciobanul asked the village of Vianul a fee of 40000 aşpri.  In the 17th century and mostly during the reign of Vasile Lupu, the internal social and political situation becomes more stabilized. This period partially coincides with the rebellions in Ukraine and the Jewish emigration. The Jews who arrived during this period were socially assimilated (not religiously though), having an important contribution to the development of trade and craftsmanship in the area.
In conclusion, we can state that in the 16th century Moldavia was mainly a transit territory. We also know that at the end of the century, the Jewish bankers from Constantinople had important commercial interests in Moldavia, getting involved even in politics. Thus, Alexandru Lăpuşneanu became ruler again, after the removal of Despot Vodă through the intervention of Iosef Nassi.  The later held a monopoly over Moldavian wine, Polish wax and honey for the Ottoman Empire. Archives in Galaţi mention other important Jewish merchants who owned businesses in Moldavia: Haim Cohen and Abraham Mosso (in 1570-1571), Nahman Tor (in 1573-1575), Abraham Gambais (in 1585-1586).
In the 17th century Moldavia became more of a transit territory, a place where Jewish traders had permanent storehouses, with marketplaces and safe sources for export goods, especially with the help of their compatriots already settled in this area. Gradually, the Ashkenazi Jews came to impose themselves upon the Sephardic, the Armenians (whose trading activities were older in Moldavia) and the Greeks (which had come recently in these markets). As we have already mentioned, the Ashkenazi’s industrious character had made them favoured by the representatives of the court as well as by those of the great landowners class.


Ştefăneşti in the 18th and 19th centuries

The vague testimonies referring to the presence of Jews in Moldavia begin to abound in the 17th century. This period is the most favourable one for the Jewish immigration in Moldavia. Many boyars, willing to develop commerce or crafts on their domains, founded market towns where Jews received fiscal facilities. However, this attitude changed in the second half of the 19th century, when the policy of national development of the new modern state begins to find itself in conflict with national minorities, including the Jews. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Jews start to become the main political issue in Romania, their emancipation, asked by the Congress of Berlin, being postponed in 1879, thus to be solved later on, in the second decade of the 20th century.
The Jewish population has increased in the 18th century, as we even have a president of the Moldavian Rabi Law Court originated from Ştefăneşti, in the person of Rabi Todris, father of the rabi Matatiahlu Calman.  As we have said before, a very first census has taken place in Moldavia in 1774, although it only recorded the ones paying the taxes. On this occasion, three Jews are being registered in Ştefăneşti at the craftsman (in Romanian ‘rufeturi’) heading. A second argument would be The Book of the Incomes Belonging to the Inhabitants of Ştefăneşti (1793-1819) – in Romanian Catastihul de venitul Ştefăneştilor (1793-1819) – which certifies the presence in the year 1798 of 198 ‘Christian, Armenian and Jewish small shops’, out of which 71 were Jewish (according to the data resulted from the corroboration with the 1801 document, as it is presented below). This document shows us that the Jewish people held the monopoly when it came to beer (the custom of the ale house), for which they were paying a tax of 32 kilos of sugar to the hatman C. Paladi. They also had the right to sell spirits, but not wine. Yet, there was an exception for the kosher wine.
The beginning of the 19th century provides us with two extremely important inventories (catagrafii) regarding the Jewish population from Ştefăneşti.  The former is dated the 6th of October 1801, thus having a significant relevance for the century that had just ended. It completes in a very inspired manner The Book of the Incomes Belonging to the Inhabitants of Ştefăneşti (Catastihul de venitul Ştefăneştilor) from 1798. We find out the fact that the Jews who lived in Ştefăneşti were included in ‘the guild of Jews’, being divided, due to reasons concerning the revenue, into three categories: families owning a booth  (71), families that did not own a booth (49) and Jewish people who granted inns on lease in the neighbouring villages (11). Therefore, in Ştefăneşti there were 131 Jewish families who paid the taxes, let us call them bourgeois, altogether with whom there certainly existed numerous ‘proletarian’ families, few of them being also mentioned in the inventory – out of which some were living with wealthier families, thus not having their own residence.
If each of the bourgeois families was made up of five persons on an average, it results a number of 655 persons. To these we can add a number equal at least of persons who did not held industrial or commercial enterprises. Consequently, without any exaggeration, we can assert that in the year 1801 there were at least 1300 Jewish people in Ştefăneşti. From the corroboration of the 1801 census with that Book of the Incomes from 1798, there follows a pretty balanced depiction of the town. Therefore, the Jewish owned approximately 71 booths, while the rest of 120 belonging to the Moldavians and the Armenians. The Jews weren’t by far in the situation of ‘suffocating’ the town’s economy, nor were they in the disagreeable posture of alcoholically poisoning the population, since the only monopoly they held concerned the beer, as they were even kept under restraint when it came to wine. Hence, the vision of the Moldavian towns full of Moldavian peasants drunk because of the evil Jewish publicans who monopolized the alcohol commerce for occult purposes, a vision ‘disseminated’ by Romanian authors such as Slavici or Alecsandri, is not accurate in the case of the Ştefăneşti town and, we daresay, in any other case. But the pre-eminence of the alcohol commerce in that period’s Moldavia offers important information to us regarding that time’s social situation.
The 1801 inventory provides us with an image accurate enough when speaking about the occupations of the Jewish paying taxes. Approximately half of the 71 Jewish commercial and industrial enterprises of the place – concisely characterised in that period as being ‘booths’ – were busy with producing and selling horilcă (an alcoholic refined drink), the other workshops and shops producing and/ or selling hats, linen, cloth, ‘Bruges goods’, clothes manufactured by the local tailors, food products, beer, salt, tobacco, glass, candles, spindles, etc. The fact that a feredauş is also mentioned also indicates the presence of a public bath in the locality. There are also enumerated two bookbinders. Thus, we must assume the fact that there were enough private libraries, which could justify the existence not only of a single, but of two bookbinders in the town. In 1801 there also existed a dohtor (doctor) named Marcu, two ‘ceauşi’ , two hahams and a Rabi called Aaron. Based upon this (last) information, I.Caproşu and Gh.Pungă conclude the fact that there were two synagogues at the beginning of the 19th century.
As for the names of the Jews from the census, they are mainly specific to the Ashkenazi Jews. There are also situations of Romanian names, in which case the inventory explicitly mentions the appellative jidov (Jew) after the name, in order to avoid any misunderstanding. Here are some examples: ‘11. Iancul jîdov’ (Iancu the Jew); ‘69. Ilie jîdov’ (Ilie the Jew). The long-standing co-habitation with the Romanians is being also confirmed by a series of Romanian appellatives added to the first name of some of the Jews: Iosop Mititelu (the 6th position), Moşcu Mărgineanul (the 19th position), Cerbu Hurtojini (the 32nd position), Leiba Bobulescu (the 33rd position), Herşcu Todireanu (the 42nd position), Herşcu Săpoteanu (the 44th position), Leiba Roşu (the 46th position).  We also note the fact that in that time, in Moldavia, there didn’t exist a modern state, having a coherent administrative politic when it came to the population. Hence, in most cases, the name of a certain person designated what nowadays would be the first name, the forename or the „Christian name”. What now represents the surname was at that time either a nickname, or an occupation, or an individualising characteristic.
In the 1820 census entitled in Romanian Jidovii hrisovuiţi ai tîrgului Ştefăneşti (The Recorded Jews of the Ştefăneşti Town), there are mentioned on the whole 70 families paying taxes. But their occupational area is larger than the one existent in the anterior inventory. Altogether with the activities indexed in the 1801 census, there also appear professions such as silk weavers, stone masons, the ones selling manufactured goods, check weighers, tax collectors, porters, undertakers and silver smiths.  The Rabi is now called Şulim, and there are three hahams: Iancu, Iosep and Zelman.
The market town has undergone a powerful economic crash in 1812, when Basarabia has been annexed by the Tzarist Empire. On this occasion, a series of Jews from Ştefăneşti have crossed the river Prut and established in Basarabia. This is how we can explain the diminishing in number of the Jews recorded in the interval between the 1801 and the 1820 census. There is also a relevant document emitted in 1832 when speaking about the town’s economic decline. It refers to an address sent from Costachi Conachi to Teodorachi Grecinsky, the tenant of the Ştefăneşti estate and town. The simple reading of the name Teodor(achi) Grecinsky offers an indication regarding the Phanariot period – which had recently ended – and the practices typical for its representatives. Here’s the text belonging to Costachi Conachi: ‘The merchant Jews from there have come to me with petition, complaining for the fact that you have closed their trades for three weeks now and that you have asked for a tax that they cannot pay, when after the situation that the market town is facing at the moment, what it should be done is cutting from what has been paid before, not  rising the payment and also because there isn’t anything that have in that market town but these alcohol business (the right of selling spirits) and if these are taken from them, then they will also be forced to leave the place and abandon the town and so on and so forth.’
On the one hand, this excerpt reveals the lame condition of the market town lacking the economic contribution of the neighbouring Basarabia region, and, on the other hand, the Phanariot-like practices performed by some of the estate tenants. The Greeks, who have migrated extensively to Moldavia in the time of the Phanariot regime, sharing the same religious beliefs with the Moldavians, have been assimilated relatively fast into the native society, unlike the Jews, who have preserved their specific difference. Grecinski is representative for the Greek origin of an individual, the same as Botezatu (The Converted), for example, indicates a Jewish origin.
Vidomostia (the list of taxes) dated in 1834 offers to us little information regarding the Jewish tax-payers who lived in the town of Ştefăneşti. There were 21 tailors, one gardener, one haham, two carters, three fur caps’ manufacturers, one horse-dealer, one glassmaker, one bookbinder, two apple-sellers, one baker, one water-carrier, one shoe-maker, one carver, one innkeeper, 40 merchants. 
From a 1845 census we find out that the Jewish Ştefăneşti comprised 52 merchants, 47 craftsmen, 7 ‘other professions’, 8 without having a job, 20 needy aged people and 26 widows.  The market town’s decline in the interval following the loss of Basarabia is evidently present. In 1801 there have been in Ştefăneşti more Jewish merchants and businessmen than 44 years afterwards.


The 20th century

The beginning of the 20th century provides us with somehow more detailed data regarding this locality. Marele Dicţionar Geografic al Romîniei (The Romania’s Great Dictionary), published in 1902, was mentioning the existence in the commune of Ştefăneşti  of 55 ponds and 12 pools, six steam mills, 21 water mills, a mill drawn by horses, three wind mills, a factory of leather tanning, a factory producing candles, one producing soap and two limestone quarries. The town’s industry also comprised tailoring, shoe-making, carpentry, wheel-making and forge workshops. Cereals, cattle and wine were sold just the same. Also, in 1920, there had been a chemist’s, a hospital, a telegraph office and a factory which produced brandy made out of grapes.
More detailed data regarding the Jewish population residing in Ştefăneşti is being offered to us by a Jewish author.  According to this source, in 1910, the town had 2883 Jews. In 1930, the number of the Jewish population reached a value of 2361, in 1941 it was 1462, and in 1947 870 , whereas at the present time there isn’t any Jew left in Ştefăneşti. The last burial performed in the town’s graveyard is dated 1984. The constant decrease of this town’s/ ştetl (in Yiddish) can be explained as being a cause of migration. Ştefăneşti has been one of the important Zionist Moldavian centres, this activity being also encouraged by the religious personalities from the town, such as the Rabi M.A. Friedman.

As for the atmosphere from the first half of the 20th century in Ştefăneşti, we do have a priceless confession belonging to Iehuda Evron-Nachberg, a native who migrated to Israel, where he wrote a brilliant monograph of the town, especially valuable by means of its subjective commentaries, through its ‘inside’ knowledge of this Jewish ştetl’s realities.
The Yiddish, altogether with the massive presence of the Hassidic Jews, many of them disciples of the well-known Rabi Friedman, have given to the ştetl a powerful native colouring. The town was the destination of the Hassidic pilgrim groups on a regular basis. Being a sort of nexus on the North-South and the East-West routes and at the same time accommodating the court of a Hassidic Rabi who encouraged the Zionism, the town has become one of the crystallization points of the migration towards Palestine and the whole world. Here could be often met groups of haluţim (pioneers), came to be given the blessing on their way to Ereţ-Israel, young people most often accompanied by their tearful relatives. Since it was a Hassidic centre, bigotry was a commonplace practice there. The religious conflicts came one after another. The aged Jews, who were more traditional-like, were seldom clashing with the younger and enterprising ones, who were less interested in respecting or even approaching the religious precepts which laid ‘the foundation’ of the traditional Jewish lifestyle.
As a result of one of these disputes the intervention of the Rabi Friedman has been requested. Some bigot traditionalists have complained to the Rabi about the not-so-pious young men who made up the Hachsara organisation from Ştefăneşti.  The Rabi analysed the thoroughness of both parts’ reasons (the ‘wise’ religious old men and the lay Zionist young men), offering to them, as a conclusion, the following parable: ‘In the Holy Temple from Jerusalem there was a spot, called the Saint of the Saints, where none was allowed to enter but the Great Priest, and even him was not allowed to enter but once in a year, on Yom Kippur. But when the Saint of the Saints was being under repair, the working plasterers were entering and coming out whenever they needed to. So does the country of the ancestors need to be rebuilt, and the masons do not have to be necessarily Great Priests.’  Here we find ourselves introduced to the realm of the Hassidic stories, written down beautifully by Martin Buber or Ellie Wiesel, but, this time, not on the magic land of the ancient Galitsia, but in our picturesque contemporary Moldavia. By means of a simple Hassidic ‘tale’, the Rabi manages to justify from a theological viewpoint the necessity of a ‘laic’ migration to the Holy Land, at the same time speaking ironically about the claims of the contemporary ‘Great Priests’.

Sundays and Thursdays were fair day, occasions for the ştetl to be full of peasants from the neighbouring villages, come in order to sell their agricultural products and buy various manufactured goods. The intense economic life has given to the town of Ştefăneşti, in the first half of the 20th century, the appellation of Moldavia’s ‘beehive’. This life dynamism, from all its aspects, is being attributed by some to the religion’s influence, and, especially, to the one belonging to the Rabi Avraam Matitiahu Friedman. The Rabi had inclusively become a commercial and financial warrant regarding the seriousness of his community’s members. After his death, in 1933, the town has become the destination of an intense Jewish and – amazingly – Christian pilgrimage, as they came to pray and place notes at his tomb. This mass phenomenon has a correspondent in the manifestations occasioned by the Saint Parascheva’s dedication day in Iaşi. Of course that such a Hassidic ‘holiday’ – or, better say, commemoration – was improving the town’s economic situation.
Ştefăneşti symbolised, as many other localities, the insertion of the modern lifestyle into a traditional community. Let us listen to Iehuda Evron-Nachberg when speaking about the encountering of the traditional with the modern in Ştefăneşti: ‘You were witnessing the transformations brought up by the modern era: the car and the lorry were replacing the cart; the bus was making the coach grow out of use, the electricity was throwing out the oil lamp, and instead of the Petromax  placed at the top of the pillar, which came up and down by means of a handle, there appeared the electric bulb; the radio was then present in order to complete the information provided by the newspapers.’
There were at least four commercial branches in the town, which were making an export trade with three continents. The cattle trade was performed by the Weiner/ Vainer family.  The animals were embarked from the Truşeşti railway terminal and brought from there to the Constanţa harbour, and further on embarked for the Western Europe or even Palestine, which at that moment was under British administration. Many of these caravans’ attendants were haluţims, who are Zionist pioneers, who – as Iehuda Evron-Nachberg said – used this cheap means of transportation, economising not only the tickets, but also the certificates imposed by the British authorized agents, which were difficult to be obtained.
The cereals trade destined to the Western Europe was being performed in the 30s by two firms, one belonging to Avraam Grisaru, Leon Goldstein and others, and the other one belonging to Ely Schapira , Moritz Rabinovici and others.
There were also two businesses that dealt with egg exportation towards Germany, led by Avraam Blumenfeld and Ştrul Schaechter. We also have in mind the fact that such a business has also existed in the Jewish community from Tg. Frumos (the mediaeval Crasna), a town which has made the subject of our previous research.
There were also exported skins of young lambs for the USA, by means of a firm from Cernăuţi, which had representations in Ştefăneşti.
As for the rectitude of the Jewish sellers from Ştefăneşti, we shall recount the following happening. During the eviction from the summer of the year 1941, when Ştefăneşti has been declared a ‘Judenrein’ area, and the inhabitants have been moved to Suliţa, a German soldier has pointed his gun towards Ioină Vainer, a cereal seller, wanting to shoot him. At that very moment, between the German and the victim interposed the priest of the village, Constantinescu, who thud saved the Jew’s life.
The perfume commerce represents an important indicator for the degree of sophistication of the urban life in Ştefăneşti. Such a firm belonged to the Goldenberg family, who was also the main support for the Hevrat Tehilim synagogue; another one belonged to the Ţiporăs family.
The town also had over 20 manufacturing shops, among which there was a biting competition.  The clients were picked form the street by the boys selling in the shops, sometimes cunningly enough. There existed a true negotiations’ ritual, which included formulae such as: ‘Come off it, master, give me more, you Christian’ or ‘You have asked me such a price that I cannot even count’ with the retort: ‘My brother, in our business it is not the head that counts, but the bag’.
There were also approximately ten haberdasher’s, few flour deposits, which usually belonged to the mill-owners (Ely Schapira owned the Hăneşti mill, and Şaiche Schwartz had the Ciuciulea mill), ironmongers, two lime storages, glassware and pottery shops, tobacco, stamps and newspapers agencies, a factory producing candles (the Stern family), one producing salami and sausages (Izidor Bernişteanu), two brick factories (Şloimă Cunăs and Iosel Abramovici respectively), an edible oil factory, a power station,  cow breeding farm and one for butter-processing (all belonging to Moritz Abramovici), a leather tanning workshop (Şmil Boldur), a wool dye works (Ely Meirovici) and a spinning mill (belonging to the Basarabian Jew Berman). Also, there were three siphon factories, one belonging to Iosăb Cohn, another to Lupu Herşcovici and Mendel Margulis, and the third to Ştrul Dămideanu – the founder of the Haoved the Zionist movement.  This information is being offered to us by Iehuda Evron-Nachberg and they sometimes come as an extremely detailed completion to the information existent in the ‘Romania’s Geographic Dictionary’. The data offered by Evron Nachberg offers a division according to the criterion of nationality (which is not accomplished by the ‘Geographic Dictionary’ and covers a period of time which comprises the interwar period, the war with its adventures and few years from the beginning of Communism (until 1947, when the author moves to Israel). Evron-Nachberg comes back two times in the Communist Romania, in order to record the huge changes suffered by his locality as a consequence of Communism and the Jews’ massive migration.
The Jewish tailors from Ştefăneşti were famous, some of them remaining in the local memory until nowadays. The best-known has been Idel-Leib-Bercovici. It is told that once, a client had been unsatisfied, because he had to wait for three months in order to have a suit made. In order to embarrass the tailor, the client tells him: ‘How come you need three months to make a costume, when God only needed six days for creating the world?’ The tailor answers him: ‘My dear, look how this world looks and see also the beauty of the suit I had made. Is there any place for comparison?’  This incident reminds us of a story immortalized by Bruno Schulz, entitled ‘The Dummies’. In his childhood, the author had been fascinated by the tailors’ skill, by their ability of creating, as compared to the divinity’s attributes.
There should also be enumerated shoe-making, carpenter, and joiner’s shops, the hairdresser’s and barber’s shops, the cafes and the confectioner’s, the photo studios, etc. All these make up the picture of a Jewish town which was very dynamic from the economic standpoint.
The Jewish Ştefăneşti contained also a series of representatives of the liberal professions: approximately 20 physicians, 6 dentists, 7 engineers, 7 chemists, few teachers, painters and artists.  On such a background there couldn’t develop a cultural life the same as intense. Due to the confluence with the Romanian rural world and with the Hassidic traditional Jewish element, the ştetl’s cultural life has had a special dynamics. And yet, before describing the cultural life, we’ll need to emphasize the religious life, which, altogether with the economic development, constitutes a second pillar upon which a genuine urban and cultural life could be built up in Ştefăneşti.

The town’s religious life  has been decisively marked by the presence of the Rabi Avraam Matitiahu Friedman. He managed to change Ştefăneşti into one of the most important Hassidic centres from the South-East of Europe, as Baruch Teriscatin considers.
A.M. Friedman has been the grandson of the Rabi Israel from Rujin, who was the grand-grandson of DovMeir from Mezritis, the successor of Bal Shem Tov , the founder of Hassidism. Hence, the Friedman Rabis belong to an important Hassidic dynasty: the Rujin one. A.M. Friedman is born in 1848  or, according to other sources, in 1849, in the town of Otek from Russia.  Due to the persecutions which were common to those days’ Russia, A.M. Friedman’s father, the Rabi Nuchăm Friedman migrates to Romania together with all his family. Avigdor Ben-zvi offers an extremely concrete reason for the coming of the Rabi Nuchăm to Moldavia. The Russian authorities ‘could not stand the fame that these Rabi was having among Christians (...)’.  This detail regarding N. Friedman and the Christians’ respect towards him is difficult to be verified, but the assertion is entirely available when it comes to his son, A.M. Friedman.
Rabi Nuchăm, nicknamed ‘der Molech’ (The Angel) had three children: Mattesui (A.M. Friedman), Ghitla and Şeiva.  He was an expert in the knowledge of Cabbala (the fundamentals of which he also taught to his son), being considered an authority in the sacred texts in general. Şeiva has become the wife of the Galaţi Rabi, and Ghitla the wife of the Sadagura one. Young Mattesui seems to have had a special propensity towards studying, becoming shortly enough initiated into the mysteries of Mişna, Talmud and Cabbala. Avigdor Ben-zvi narrates the fact that, after the Bar Mitzvah ceremony of his son, Rabi Nuchăm had the epiphany that his son will be a ‘barren tree’. Indeed, although he had been married twice, A.M. Friedman didn’t have any children, and at his death he didn’t let any heir for the throne of the Ţadik of Ştefăneşti, his designated successor – that is Menachem Nahum Friedman, the son of one of the Rabi sisters – dying a month before him, on the 21st Sivan 1933. N. Friedman, the father of A.M. Friedman, died on 14 Kislev 5623 and was buried at the old graveyard from Iaşi, situated in the Ciurchi neighbourhood, which does not exist anymore, being ‘relocated’ by the authorities in the time of the Antonescu regime. Nowadays the area of the former graveyard is being occupied by a park. There isn’t any memorial plaque in this place.
When he was 21 years old, in 1865 , A.M. Friedman arrives at Ştefăneşti, where he is appointed Admor  – a Hassidic title given to those Rabi who got very close to God by means of their holiness. Here he dedicates all his life to the service of the spiritual interests (and not only) belonging to the community. During his leadership there hasn’t been any turmoil among the members of the local Hassidic community, nor between the Romanians and the Jews. Ştefăneşti seemed to be a sort of ‘blessed space’. We do not have any conflicts between Romanians and Jews not even during the uprising which took happened in 1907, let aside the absence of the ordinary chicaneries which were periodically organised by the Romanian authorities because of patriotism: expulsions, accusations regarding ritual murders or poisoning the peasants with alcohol, etc.
As for the unrest which troubled the Jewish community, setting in opposition the ultra-Orthodox and the Zionists, an interesting testimony for his mediator capacity has been presented above.
The Rabi was remarkable due to a special optimism when it came to the human condition, which was not very justified in a period overwhelmed with anti-Semitic conflicts. He used to say over and over again – especially with occasions which opposed the two parties (the rich and the poor or the Jews and the Romanians) that “all the people are brothers, but they are afraid to hug each other”.  When a rich Jew – as a retort to the pressures that referred to the setting up of a numerus clausus in the Universities, as well as other chicanery – wanted to pay less the Christian employees than the Jewish ones, when asking for the Rabi piece of advice he got as an answer the request not to commit discrimination.  The Rabi was also a great nature-admirer. Ever since childhood he used to spend every day few hours amid the landscape surrounding him. He used to ask from his disciples to love nature, since ‘God loves it too.’   Thus, we have a sui-generis ecologist in the person of this Rabi from Ştefăneşti.
His Ştefăneşti residence ‘had become a pilgrimage [place] for all the poor, the rich, the ill, the hopeless, all [the ones] suffering from bodily or soul illnesses (...). Jews or Christians, peasants or land owners, workers or proprietors, children or old people, sane or sick they came to the Rabi.’
A.M. Friedman came to Iaşi every year, with the occasion of Hanukkah, and he stayed there for about a month.  He owned a (Hassidic) court in this town, which bore his name, situated somewhere in the area called Tg. Cucu. One of the reasons of this annual visits had to do with the commemoration of his father (at the Ciurchi graveyard), but his presence was also justified by the existence of a great number of followers in the Moldavian capital. We also know about him the fact that he had travelled twice abroad, once to Odessa and the other time to Otek (Russia).
The Rabi also had the fame of making wonders. There were also a lot of stories circulating about him. The putting an end to a pestilential epidemic is also attributed to him, when he performed a religious ceremony at the local graveyard.  The Romanians were constantly appealing to him, making for his fame to continue for a long time after the last Jew left Ştefăneşti, and even after the digging up and the removal of the bones belonging to the Rabi from the local graveyard.
There are many confessions about the Romanians who came as pilgrims to the Rabi in order for him to solve their various problems. B. Tercatin and Iehuda Evron-Nachberg  tell us about a character named Grigore Lupaşcu, whose children were all dying. Overstepped by the ineffectiveness of the ‘modern’ medicine and after he had uselessly made the tour of all the monasteries, he decides, following the insistence of a Jewish friend, to make a try with the Rabi. A.M. Friedman gives to him a very ordinary piece of advice: ‘Pull down your house, as it has been built upon an evil place and erect another one, far away, and everything will go well’. The advice proved to bear fruit, and our man had three children again, who also had a brilliant future, becoming professors at the University and others. The narrative is significant, as it exemplifies a practice which existed among the Romanians.
Rabi Friedman had died on a Saturday night, in the summer of 1933, on the 21st of Tamuz: July, according to the Julian calendar. It is told that at his burial there had been over 50, 000 people.
Every year, on his death date, the Rabi was commemorated at the graveyard, an occasion for thousands of people to meet. In the case which covered his tomb there were dozens of thousands of notes – grievances written in Hebrew or in Yiddish. He was exhumed and then inhumed again in the graveyard from Nahlat Iţhak, Tel Aviv. The ceremony was performed by the then Romanian chief-Rabi, Doctor Moses Rosen, in October 1968. The followers form Israel of the Rabi commemorate even today the Admor’s death day in this new graveyard. There are also many who come in other days of the year.  But he is simultaneously worshipped in some other place, in some other country, by people having a different religion: in the locality where he was a Rabi. Here the Romanians continue to burn candles and place notes, asking for the Rabi to intercede with God in their favour. A. M. Friedman is the last Jew who persisited in not leaving Ştefăneşti, or, better said, who wasn’t let to leave. He is vivid in the memory and the hopes of a community which he properly led, beyond any ethnical-religious differences.
After the Rabi’s death, the communal Rabi Iosef Brayer had opened an Ieşiva bearing the name “Beit Avraam”, in his own yard even. This one had been closed after the loss of Basarabia. The next Hassidic Rabi was Eshel Hager. Thus, A.M. Friedman had been the last in his line. The Rujin dynasty also had representatives in Galitsia, Bucovina and Moldavia, the most important Moldavian centres being Sadagura, Ştefăneşti, Boian, Paşcani and Buhuşi.
The communal Rabi coexisted with the Hassidic Ţadic.  We know that, between 1897 and 1905, the communal Rabi from Ştefăneşti had been Bezazel Zaev Şafran, born in 1867, in Pomaru, Galiţia.  Alexandru Şafran, his son, was the Romanian chief – Rabi in the period of Shoah, and after the setting up of Communism in Romania, he was a Geneva Rabi. Al. Şafran, altogether with W. Filderman, the chief of the Jewish communities from Romania, have had an important role in saving a part of the Jewish Romanian community during the second World War. B.Z. Şafran becomes prime-Rabi of the Bacău community in 1905. At his recommendation, he is succeeded in Ştefăneşti by the Rabi Mordechai Dov Brayer, who was born in Rujin. After his death, his son, Iosef Brayer, who had been a loyal Zionist, becomes the Rabi of the community. He migrates in 1947 to the USA, where he becomes a Rabi in Bronx, New York, at the Tiferet Avraam Matitiahu synagogue, which was built in the memory of A. M. Friedman.  Eventually, he arrives in Israel in 1964 and is the initiator of an unusual project: the one of transferring the bones of the Friedman Rabi and some of his disciples to Israel. This transfer had taken place in 1968, while the Communist regime was in bloom.
With a population of 3, 000 Jews, the town of Ştefăneşti had 10 synagogues. Three of them were situated in the very yard of the Rabi, the most important of them being Kloiz. In the centre of the town, next to the Law Court and opposite the Change Credit Bank and the Orthodox Church there was the Hevre-Gah Synagogue (Gmilat-Hasadim).  The other six synagogues were in the Eastern part of the own, along the Başeu brook: The Great Synagogue (in the neighbourhood of the Christian cemetery), the tradesmen Synagogue, the psalms Synagogue, the Şloimă Wolf Synagogue (entitled this way after the name of its founder), the tailors Synagogue and the Şmuel Moşe Synagogue (entitled after the name of its founder). In 1979, during Iehuda Evron-Nachberg’s last visit in Ştefăneşti, there wasn’t any synagogue left.
One of the effects of the encounter between Hassidism and Zionism in Ştefăneşti has been the practicing on a large scale of the Hebrew language. The teacher Hana Eizenstain had created in Ştefăneşti the first kindergarten in the Herbrew language, teaching this language simultaneously at the Israelite-Romanian school called Narcise Leven.  Moreover, she organized courses of Hebrew language for adults within the Zionist movements. She had adopted the Eliezer Ben-Iehuda system of teaching – “Hebrew as a sole language”, not using any other language.  After her leaving, the Hebrew courses had been taken over by the Steinhaus teacher from Răşcani , a place which is now on the territory of the Moldavian Republic. Another promoter of the movement for learning Hebrew in Ştefăneşti was Sulim Rabinovici. This linguistic competence acquired in Ştefăneşti had become very useful altogether with the ‘aliaua’ (the migration) of the majority of authors to Israel.
At the beginning of the 20th century there had been two movements in the town: a Zionist one (Aurora) and a Communist one (Luceafărul). Each was endowed with a library, having book stocks in the Romanian, French, German and Russian languages. But the Communists’ movement also included intellectuals who were not Jewish. During wartime, the Communist Jews from Ştefăneşti had been deported to the concentration camp from Tg. Jiu. The activity and the cultural struggle have managed to unite the Jewish population from Ştefăneşti, transforming it into a powerful community, providing it with a powerful sense of identity, which other communities lacked.
Although it was a tiny little town, the theatre was one of the inhabitants’ constant preoccupations. The performances were taking place either in the Binder Hall, in the hall belonging to the school Narcise Leuven or in the town’s public garden. The shows were organized by companies of professional theatre who were on tour (Jewish or Romanian companies), or, more often than not, by the Zionist youth movements. The Jewish repertoire included plays by Shalom Aleichem, Itzik Manger, Avraam Goldfaden, M. Ronetti-Roman and others.  The Zionist movements’ repertoire, among whom we could note authors such as Macabi, Gordonia and C.R.S, included plays having a patriotic range of themes. After the war, a lot of plays were presenting topics from the period of Shoah. The theatre which did not have a Jewish specific character comprised plays by Caragiale, Moliere, Racine and others.
In time, the seventh art, the cinema, had also imposed its presence. Usually, the cinema shows were being organised in the hall owned by the school Narcise Leuven, and then in the hall of Wolfsohn, placed on the road to Iaşi. The most appreciated productions from the film era had Charlie Chaplin as their protagonist. The one to whom the initiative of introducing the cinema in Ştefăneşti belonged was Idel Clecner.
The industry of the local entertainment also included few orchestras, the repertoire of whom included what we could call today “klezmer music”. The most important orchestra was Macabi. Also, for the pretentious ones, unsatisfied by the performances of the local orchestras, there were automatic and electric gramophones and, later on, radios.

For the inhabitants of Ştefăneşti, the subscription to the Zionist publications was almost a duty of honour. They had subscriptions to daily newspapers such as Renaşterea (The Resurrection), Mîntuirea (The Redemption), Unzer Zeit (Vremea noastră, in English “In Our Time”), and to the weekly papers such as Bar-Kohva, Copilul evreu (The Jewish Child), Deir Omăr (Ciocanul, in English “The Hammer”), Speranţa (The Hope), Haşmonaea, but also to the Romanian newspapers. In Romania from those days there was a Zionist publishing house, called Bicurim (in Romanian Trufandalele, translated in English as “The Masterpieces”), where there had been published authors such as Simon Dubnov, Hirsch Graetz, Theodor Loewenstein-Lavy, A.D. Gordon etc. The Bicurim books were automatically delivered in the libraries of the Zionist movements’ library from Ştefăneşti. Hence, culturally speaking, the members of this community were far from being isolated.
In 1930, Ştefăneşti had been visited by Nahum Socolov, the president of the World Zionist Organisation , who held a conference in the hall of the Great Synagogue. He remained deeply impressed by the level of knowledge when it came to the Hebrew language in Ştefăneşti, asserting that here “even the stones whisper in Hebrew”.  The leader of the Romanian Zionist Movement, Drul Brezis, considered Ştefăneşti as being the “Romanian Tel-Aviv”.  The Zionist movements were organizing conferences on a regular basis, where they used to invite personalities from various domains. These manifestations were not only aiming at the indoctrination, but also at the edification of a general knowledge among the inhabitants. All these activities had been forbidden by the Romanian authorities, who came more and more anti-Semite after the loss of Basarabia, in 1940.
The unusual Zionist fervour from Ştefăneşti is the consequence of several factors. Probably the most important had been the fact that Rabi A. M. Friedman, as well as his nephew, N. Friedman  – the young Rabi, dead unfortunately before the one whom he was meant to be the successor of – has supported the Zionism. This was something unusual among the Hassidic followers. A.M. Friedman has contributed to the colonization of Israel not only indirectly, by supporting the migration, but also directly, buying at the beginning of the 20th century a terrain in the Ahuza neighbourhood from Haifa.  At the same time, the Rabi Brayer has also been a promoter of Zionism, managing at an old age to remove even the mortal remains of the Rabi Friedman to Israel. This initiative of the Rabi Iosef Brayer is a unique fact in the history of Zionism.
Another factor which contributed to the crystallization of Zionism has been the anti-Semitism of the Romanian authorities. Until the beginning of the Communist regime, the Romanian authorities have been extremely “tolerant” when it came to Zionism. But the Communists have gradually changed their attitude towards Zionism, as they even sent to prison a series of the movements’ leading figures. A third factor of Zionism in Ştefăneşti – as Iehuda Evron-Nachberg considers – has been constituted of the activism performed by the Hebrew teacher Hana Eizenstein. Persuaded by her, many other leading intellectuals of the town have adopted a Zionist orientation. We should also add to this list the local Zionist organisations, which constituted an effect and a cause at the same time of the Zionism in Ştefăneşti.
The first Zionist organization from town, that is Gordonia, was founded in 1930 by Ruhăl Ghertz and Beny Timen. Gordonia was a far-reaching one, as it had over 100 branches on the Romanian territory, out of which 50 were in Basarabia and Bucovina. The Ştefăneşti subsidiary was one of the 15 which also functioned in the period situated between 1945-1949 and in this last interval the names of Moşe Grisaru, Haim Grisaru-Gherşony and Iosolă Hafner-Mîndru stand out.
Ştefăneşti also had a sportive Zionist movement, which is the Macabi. This organisation had been founded in Turkey, in 1894, expanding afterwards in the majority of the countries where the Jews lived. Macabi Ştefăneşti had been founded in 1923  and was known especially for its football team. At the Macabi competition which took place in 1935 at Tel Aviv, Ştefăneşti had two representatives, Mina Segall and Tuly Cotter.

Any shtetl had its picturesque characters, and Ştefăneşti was no exception to the rule. As an example, the prototype of the corrupt was embodied by a Romanian policeman, nicknamed Zwei lei, due to the daily tax he was asking from the Jewish sellers.  The type of the skinflint was represented by a Romanian innkeeper, whose greediness was famous. She did not refrain from stealing from the Romanians and the Jews alike. ‘Should we have such a merchant from among the Jewish population, it would have been said that this is how the Jewish tradesmen are, but, since she’s not Jewish, it was told that this is how lady Petculeasa is like’, says Iehuda Evron-Nachberg.
Generally speaking, the relationships between the Romanian population and the Jewish one were pretty cordial and they were even helping each other frequently. There were even ‘business partnerships’, as the one existing between the Chiaburu family and the Shulim brothers and between Şmil Bodoagă and Petruţa Balan respectively.  There were few Romanians in the village and, consequently, fewer anti-Semite. The most frantic ones were the brothers Tănasă and Niculaie Poduţă.
The Jews used to take part to the Romanian celebrations, such as Easter or Christmas. During the winter holidays, the Jewish population received Romanian carol singers, some of these carol singing choirs, conducted by psalm readers or teachers, being considered by Jews as ‘splendid’.
A picturesque character among Jews was also the doctor Terleţky, originally born in Basarabia, a very good diagnostician, but only in the first part of the day, when he could be found sober. He was a travelling physician. He used to book a room at the cheapest hotel from town, were he was expected each morning by the clients, with whose money he used to get drunk in the afternoon. He was always accompanied by a dog, and the children would gather in groups and shout behind him: ‘Tărleţky the crazy man!’ But this physician had an unusually kind heart. ‘There were even children who asked money from him; due to a painfully unconscious kindness, he used to get rid of his last penny until the next day, when he got again his payment from the patients who used to track him and wait for him at the hotel to wake up.’

Among the personalities born in Ştefăneşti, probably the most important one is the painter Ştefan Luchian. As for the Jewish population, the most famous names are the one of Solomon Regal, who translated into Yiddish the poetry of Mihai Eminescu (the Romanian national poet) and the poet from the Ardeal province George Coşbuc; Avraam Levenbarun, a deputy in the Israeli Parliament; the comedian Iacov Bodo; the poet Shaul Carmel, the nowadays leader of the Romanian Writers Organisation from Israel; the physician writer Dorel Şor; the painter Moritz Manes; Menachem Mendel Brayer, a teacher of Jewish sciences and a doctor in clinical physiology at the University Ieşiva from New York; Meir Iţhak Brayer, the director of the Har Etzion Ieşiva from Ierusalim; Iehuda Evron-Nachberg, the author of an excellent monograph about Ştefăneşti, and many others.

In 1941, the Jewish population of Ştefăneşti , which comprised approximately 750 families, is being evicted by the Romanian authorities  to the locality called Suliţa, situated at a distance of approximately 40 kilometres. They were forbidden to carry anything but hand luggage. They arrive at the destination after two days when they only travelled at night, so as not to make inconvenient the reshuffle of Romanian and German military forces. In Suliţa they are being put up by the Jewish families from there. Later on, the Jews from Ştefăneşti ‘arrived in Botoşani, grieved, downhearted and oppressed. Ştefăneşti had been bombed and destroyed by the fights which took place, on the outbreak of the war, between the German and the Soviet armies.’
During the eviction from Suliţa, the Romanian authorities intended to exile to Tg. Jiu all the Jewish men aged 18 – 50, but this arrangement is being postponed due to the intervention of Iancu Boldur with the Police Chief from Botoşani, a mayor born in Ştefăneşti, who finds a compromise solution: taking hostages. Consequently, the Rabi Iosef Brayer, Gherşon Reines, Samy Lehrer and Iancu Facler are being kept by force indoors at synagogue on the Elisabeta street from Botoşani.
The Jewish men who were able to work have been mobilized, beginning with 1940, for the ‘compulsory work’, laying out and taking care of the roads (in winter time), digging ditches and generally doing any work imposed by the Romanian authorities. Afterwards, most of the men capable to work have been banished to the work camps from Dobrogea and Transnistria. Some have been taken out from the work camps from Transnistria and exiled to the Vapniarka concentration camp. Among these there were Moritz and Kivă Facler, Hana Nadler, Zeilig Dadi, Ihiel Schaechter, Iosef Croitoru, Herş Weintraub, Moşe Pantofaru, Rahmil and Şmil Ciuraru, Faviş Rabinovici, Grişa Noehovici, Herman Milştein, Moşe Papucaru, Aaron Weiner.  Many of them didn’t come back anymore.
The dramas from the time of the Second World War are numerous. The first have taken place in 1940, simultaneously with the withdrawal of the Romanian army and administration from Basarabia. Max Pitaru-Leibovici dies stricken by the butt stock of the Romanian soldiers who were withdrawing.  Iehuda Evron-Nachberg recounts how, in 1940, Olga Gafencu, the wife of the local tax collector was yelling that they were doing ‘a good job’ to the policeman Delescu, whom, along with two other policemen were abusing ‘the betrayer’ Ghisy Rosenberg, for the fault of ‘giving away’ Basarabia to the Russians.
The father of Shaul Carmel – the president of the association of the Israeli writers having a Romanian origin died after being pushed away from the train by which he was travelling to the regiment where he had been mobilised as an officer for the Romanian army. Moişe Friedman had died from the very first day of the eviction to Suliţa, due to the exhausting effort. On the occasion of the second banishment for Botoşani the one who dies is Iehudit Balan. The cereal-seller Leon Goldenstein is killed on the 29th of June 1941, on the occasion of the Massacre from Iaşi. Solomon Seagal is being killed on the 22nd of August 1944, a day before the collapse of the Antonescu regime. The physician Volody Zepelman had commited suicide altogether with his wife and daughters while being deported to Transnistria. Motăl Ghertz, one of the founders of the Grodonia Zionist organisation, was killed by the Romanian soldiers from Transnistria in front of Aviv, his son. Others who died in Transnistria have been Haim Calimbăr, Velvăl and Iancu Căruceru, Ely Ceauşu, Sendăr and Idel Ciobotaru, Dudolă Cojocaru, the Gorănstein family, Samy Dachas, Aaron Glauberg, Nută Grinberg, Herş Hascal, Leib Peretz, Leibola Schaechter, Bercu and Moină Suliţeanu, Iancu Ţăranu, Leon and Sabina Bregher.Also, Moină Donayevsky had died on the 9th of May 1945, the day when the Nazi Germany surrendered, as a soldier of the Red Army.
One of the Jews mobilised for the “patriotic” work by the Romanian authorities in the nearness of the front had been captured by the Soviet Army and were deported altogether with their ex Romanian and German butchers to the concentration camps from URSS. This is the case of Fredy Glűck  and Iosel Lamfit, who have endured the conditions of the Russian gulag between 1944 and 1948.

In 1945, the inhabitants of Ştefăneşti were allowed to return home. And yet, only approximately 300 of them chose to come back home. Here it is how Iehuda Evron-Nachberg describes this coming back: “When they returned to Ştefăneşti, they found the town bombed and even burnt, and what was left had been stolen. The houses which were still intact on the outside were empty on the inside, robbed in daylight by gangs of burglars, against whom you could not defend and because of whom you could not complain to anyone.”
And yet, the community had begun to recover: there have been resumed the commercial connections with the surrounding Romanian villages, there was even built a factory of edible oil, there have been restored two of the ten synagogues (Hevre Gah from the centre of the town and Kloiz from the yard of the Rabi Friedman), the butchery and the graveyard were reopen.
Also, the cultural life of Ştefăneşti had been taken back, as the reopening of the Gordonia Zionist organisation had been managed, in the house of Strul Butz.  Along with this one, there has also been founded another group, called Buselia. Between 1945 and 1947 there were organised theatrical performances on topics that dealt with the Jews’ life from the period of Shoah, and, more often than not, on topics having to do with the life of the haluţimi from Ereţ, Israel. Eventually, due to the Jews’ migration, the locality begins to lose its population. Their place is being taken over by the Romanians and mostly by gypsies. The latter were sometimes residing in the Jewish houses only with the purpose of destroying them, selling their carpentry and the bricks they were made of. Thus, the Jewish identity of the ştetl begins to fade away, Ştefăneşti getting to resemble more and more to the typical Romanian village.
We shall now let one of the Jewish inhabitants from Ştefăneşti to recount his memories about his first visit to Romania, after the alia to Israel and about the impressions he got on this occasion. ‘After the first wave of emotions, there came the shocks: I’ve felt the first one when I stepped upon the streets from Ştefăneşti. The streets and the houses, which used to be once full of life, were now deserted and even in a very bad condition. Only few houses have remained intact, among which the Havri-gah synagogue. On the place of the durable houses there were now growing corn, sunflower and weeds. In some of the houses on our street there were living gypsies from Bădiuţi. All the houses which were sometimes placed on the portion beginning from Herman Goldenberg’s house and up to Goldman’s house have been demolished (...), in order to sell the carpentry, the bricks, the sheets and the window panes belonging to the demolished houses. (...)
The imposing buildings, which also included the Kloiz synagogue from the yard of the holy Rabi, were destroyed, as if they had never existed, and in their place there was maize growing now. The only place we have found intact was the Jewish cemetery. We got close with hesitating steps to the building which covers the tomb of the holy Rabi, whose bones had been transferred to Israel a year before (...).’
The confession above, belonging to Iehuda Evron-Nachberg, is being very touching. And yet it is not the last one; he will come back in ten years’ time, in order to record the awful condition of the town where he was born, to whose symbiosis between traditional and modern he assisted to in the 30s and had splendidly called to mind. The tone he uses to describe the market town on his last visit is totally gloomy. Let us listen to his recount from 1979: ‘On our street there were only few houses left standing upright... ramshackle (...). The Hevri-Gah synagogue did not exist anymore (...). On the main street the houses of Latzres, Şmil Stoleru, Feinstein and Schapira were untouched. But instead of the houses which belonged once to Burichovitz, Haiche Leib, Wexler, Hună Weiss, Leib Gherşăn Grisaru, Iosăl Oring and Surkă Cohn there was now a station with tractors and agricultural stock.’

When I first visited the town of Ştefăneşti, in the year 2005, as I was fascinated by the story of the Rabi Friedman, all that was left here was the Jewish cemetery, which was undergoing an advanced and continuous stage of degradation. Among the tombs, a local go-ahead had cultivated potatoes. The one I’m speaking about is Gheorghe Pop, the very person to whom it has been given the task of protecting the local cemetery, who was living on the premises and was using the agricultural terrain owned by the Romanian Federation of the Jewish Communities, offered in exchange of the protection he was supposed to offer to the last vestige of the Jewish identity that still existed in Ştefăneşti, that is the graveyard. His calf was laying itself out to pull down with the chain by means of which it was tied the few gravestones that were still standing around it. The guardian hadn’t welcomed me warmly, but by shouting and swearing. Deeply impressed by the experience I’ve underwent in Ştefăneşti, I’ve rapidly taken the first means of transportation for the civilized world. Then I began to draw the attention of the public opinion by means of the press. But, meanwhile, there appeared other titles which announced destructions in several other Jewish cemeteries form Romania. Not long ago, in the autumn of 2008, few hundred gravestones have even been vandalized in Bucharest, the capital city of our country. This is the framework within whom we are trying to save probably the last relic of the Jewish identity from a painful number of Romanian localities. It is all about cemeteries...
The graveyard from Ştefăneşti is remarkably beautiful, even in its damaged condition; it does have the charm of the ruins! Its head-stones are extraordinary artistic works, their symbolism is extremely rich, truly fascinating. Ştefăneşti has been a ştetl with a powerful Hassidic identity, which he had kept until the departure of the last Jew. Now this identity is only being reflected in the cemetery.
In the middle of the graveyard there is the ‘mausoleum’ of the Rabi Friedman. Actually, it is all about a modest empty room, built above the Rabi’s ex tomb, and we say ‘ex-tomb’, because his bones were exhumed in 1968 and moved to Israel. Therefore, what we have is an empty room above an empty tomb. Once, as the Romanian chief Rabi Moses Rosen (who is dead now) used to say, this empty room was filled with huge piles of notes on which there were written prayers in various languages: Ivrit, Yiddish and Romanian language. Now, the only ones who still place prayers at the empty tomb of the Rabi are the Orthodox Christian Romanians. We also dared to open some of these requests. Others were open by the chief Rabi Moses Rosen in 1968 and he wrote about them. Here’s a fragment from his testimony: ‘You are wrong if you think that «the house» of the Rabi was empty. On the contrary, it was filled up to the ceiling, full to the brim, but not with funeral wreaths, nor marble ornaments. It was breathtakingly full with a huge heap of small sheets of paper. There were yhousands, dozens of thousands. Who could even count these «Kwitlăh» pieces of paper, the letters addressed to the Ţadik who is not alive anymore? Who could decipher this manner of writing, these holy letters, drenched in blood and tears? Who has the strenghth to unearth each drama, each suffering, each tragic dilemma which is being hidden underneath the lines of these «small letters» addressed to the Rabi who doesn’t live anymore.’
Today we are trying to call your attention to this. We would like to save the cemetery belonging to one of the most important Hassidic community from the 16th – 20th centuries’ Europe, where there is the tomb of the most important Rabi from Romania. There isn’t anything left. It is our duty not to let the time and the people alter this unique legacy.