Yom Kippur

Today is the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, the Day of Atonement. That's why this caught my attention on the walk home from church this evening - the synagogue gates, still secured closed with chains & an ancient padlock. I've glimpsed lights on inside occasionally for the last 8 days - for the first time in the almost two years. But still no real life. I wonder what it would have been like on Yom Kippur 100 years ago, when the synagogue was still "new" (it was built in 1899) or even 70 years ago, when Jewish life was at its height around here.

In the '30s, there were hundreds of thousands of Jews in Romania. Before WWII, only Russia and Poland boasted larger populations of Jews. In the Romania of today, there are somewhere between 7000 and 12000 Jews (depending on which census you believe), 80% over the age of 60. At least a quarter of a million Romanian Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and another quarter of a million left after the war in mass migrations to the west and to the newly formed Israel.

I would assume there probably aren't enough Jewish men in this community to sustain the synagogue (I think rabbinical law still requires 10 men in order to have a functional synagogue). Just made me sad tonight, thinking of the part of the Romanian heritage that is almost completely lost, that after another generation will likely be completely erased.