Un album al Cernăuțului • Album von Czernowitz • The Album of Czernowitz

 

 

Preface [4-5]
The History of the City [6-55]
Administration [56-79]
The Romanians [80-109]
The Germans [110-137]
The Jews [138-177]

• Bernhard Baltinester [143-145]
• Gottfried Bursztyn [146]
• Josef Fischer [147]
• Friedrich Fischer [148]
• Bernhard Flemminger [149-150]
• Dr. Max Fokschaner [151]
• Elias Kampelmacher [152-153]
• Markus Kampelmacher [153-154]
• Matthias Roll [154-155]
• Aba Steiner [155-156]
• Josef Steiner [157]
• Dr. Benno Straucher [158-160]
• Wilhelm Tittinger [160-161]
• Jakob Hecht [162]
• Jakob Kindler [163]
• Karl Klüger [164-165]
• Dawid Tittinger [165]
• Dr. Neumann Wender [166]
• Hersch Trichter [167-168]
• Dr. Salo von Weisselberger [168-169]
• Dr. Salomon Kinsbrunner [170]
• Lazar Roth [171]
• Adolf Wallstein [172]
• The Jewish House [173-174]
• The Toynbee Hall [175-177]

The Poles [178-191]
The Ukrainians [192-209]
Trade and Manufacturing Sector [210-249]
Industry [250-291]
Miscellaneous [292-309]

Die "Judenfrage" in Rumänien • The "Jewish Question" in Romania

Südostdeutsche Tageszeitung, 1941/04/20
Adolf Hitler's 52nd Birtday: "Führer Command, We Follow!"

1938/01/12: The Jewish Question in Romania
1938/01/26: Accelerated Divorce Proceedings Between Pedigreed Romanians and Jewish Women
1938/12/20: More Than 1100 Liquor and Tobacco Licenses Revoked
1939/03/04: Fake Documents in the Citizen Review
1939/05/18: Romania and the Congress of Berlin
1939/11/26: The Final Figures of the Jewish Audit
1940/07/02: The Refugees Arrive by Automobiles, Trains, Horse Carriages and Ships
1940/07/09: Perfect Order at the New Romanian-Russian Border
1940/08/06: Jews are not Prevented from Relocation to Bessarabia
1940/10/18: Strange Deaths of Jews in Chisinau
1940/12/03: Iancu Edelmann & Co. Produce Fake IDs
1940/12/07: No Hurdle for the Migration of Jews to Bessarabia
1941/03/28: Jews Without Camouflage
1941/07/11: The Conquest of Czernowitz
1941/07/11: How the GPU, Assisted by the Jews, Resided in Czernowitz
1941/08/07: Severe Jewish Decree for Bukovina
1941/08/10: Dr. Popovici Mayor of Czernowitz
1941/08/10: The Christianization of Jews over the Last Ten Years
1941/08/12: When do the German Farmers Return?
1941/08/22: Jewish Houses Are Not Auctioned
1941/09/06: All Properties of Jews are Transferred to the State
1941/09/13: "The Marshal’s Right-Hand"
1941/09/14: Ukraine in Figures

The Czernowitz Jews

Südostdeutsche Tageszeitung, 1941/09/24, p. 6

From about 70,000 Jews originally in Czernowitz, only about 30,000 to 40,000 remain after the liberation of the city. In order to house them appropriately, a delegation from Czernowitz embarked on a journey to Lodz, Krakow and Lublin to study the organization of the local ghettos.

1941/10/07: The Speech of the German Ambassador
1941/10/28: Jewish Crimes Against the Romanian Population
1941/11/06: Referendum in Romania on November 9th
1941/11/23: Jews from the Eastern Territories Smuggled to Bucharest
1941/11/30: Jewish Question Settled in Transnistria
1941/12/04: Smuggling of Jews to Bucharest
1941/12/07: Disciplinary Procedure Against Fildermann
1942/01/21: They Didn’t Like the Stay in the Ghettos
1942/01/22: Jews Have to Clear the Snow For 5 Days
1942/01/27: The Jews are Clearing the Snow
1942/01/29: Additional Jews Conscripted for Clearing the Snow
1942/01/30: Eastern Jews Are Not Allowed into the Country
1942/03/08: Deported to the Concentration Camp in Transnistria
1942/05/06: Smuggling of Food for the Jews in Moghilev
1942/05/14: The Coffeehouse Jews
1942/05/29: "The Sacred War"
1942/07/05: Sharp Measures Against Work-Shy Jews
1942/07/07: Expropriation of the Properties of the Jewish Communities

Expulsion of the Jews from Romania

Südostdeutsche Tageszeitung, 1942/08/08, p. 3

The governmental "Judenzentrale" has now completed the official census of all Jews residing in the territory of Romania. It leads to the result that in total only 273,409 Jews live in today’s Romanian state territory, not counting Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina (which should be viewed from a different perspective). Out of this, 97,868 Jews are attributed to Bucharest; thus, the country’s capital is at the same time the city with the highest Jewish population, with a share of about 37%. According to official findings, in Bessarabia there are now no more Jews at all, following the expulsion to the east of the inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto of Chisinau. Czernowitz still has about 16,000 Jewish residents, but they now live in another quarter than the previous one of this formerly very heavily jewified city. The share of the Jews in the remaining cities is as follows: Iasi 24,000; Bacau 13,000; Galati 13,000; Piatra-Neamt 11,000; and Timisoara 11,000. Except for Bucharest and Timisoara, and the formerly heavily jewified Moldavian cities, none of the Romanian cities has more than 10,000 Jewish residents; the remaining 90,000 Jews were gathered in the provinical capitals, where the Jews from the rural areas have also been concentrated. 17,000 out of the total number of male Jews received permission to remain in their companies as part of "economically indispensable workforces," while all the rest were enlisted for forced labor. When it comes to the solution of the Jewish Question in Romania, the announcement by the Undersecretary of State for Romanization on the upcoming elaboration and publication of a Jewish Statute is of highest significance. According to this, compulsory wearing of the Jewish badge and other restrictions will be introduced for the Jews. Meanwhile the "Judenzentrale" is making comprehensive preparations for the total expulsion of the Jews from Romania. As soon as autumn this year, 25-30,000 Jews will be expelled from areas of the country already defined. However, the expulsion will have to be suspended in October, since thereafter no further capacity will be available for the transport of Jews out of Romania to their dedicated destination areas. Next spring the expulsion will be carried forward to its conclusion. Considering that 800,000 Jews lived in Romania prior to the territorial losses of 1940 (out of which 200,000 were allocated to Hungary according to the Vienna Award), one can get an idea of the relief given to the country by the transfer of 185,000 Jews to Transnistria and other Eastern Territories. The expulsion of the remaining Jews recorded in today’s census will gradually progress as well, so that Romania, alongside Slovakia, will be the first non-German state which brought the Jewish Question to a truly Final Solution.

1942/08/08: Romania’s Contribution
1942/08/09: Jewish Speculators are Deported Across the Bug River
1942/08/11: Roaming of Jews in the Streets is Forbidden
1942/08/14: Romania Becomes Free of Jews
1942/08/15: Roaming in the Streets of Bucharest is Forbidden
1942/09/23: Death Penalty for Unauthorized Return from Transnistria
1942/10/06: "Labor Army" in Transnistria
1942/10/20: The City Center of Czernowitz Cleared of Jews
1942/12/05: The Romanization Office Manages More than 11,000 Houses
1943/01/06: The Liquidation of Former Jewish Properties
1943/02/12: The Dispossession of Jews from the Annexed Territories
1943/03/06: "I Believe in the  Final Victory"
1943/03/17: That’s what the Romanian Population Should Never Forget
1943/06/18: Two Jews Condemned to Death in Czernowitz
1943/07/02: Census of Jews in Czernowitz
1943/11/26: Romania’s Battle Against Judah

 Courtesy: ANNO - AustriaN Newspapers Online 

Pogromurile din Bucovina si Dorohoi • The Pogroms of Bukovina and Dorohoi

 

Carmen Tagsorean, PhD Candidate, "Babes-Bolyai" University of Cluj-Napoca:
HE LIVED TO WRITE, HE WROTE TO LIVE – MARIUS MIRCU
Abstract: Some of the most important names of Romanian cultural life belong to the writers of the Jewish community. Whether we refer to the interwar or postwar period, their talent is illustrated both in the press and in the literature of the time. One of the existential dilemmas they had to face was that of their double identity. They belonged to the Jewish community, but, at the same time, to the Romanian society. Many of the Jewish writers put their thoughts on paper either in Romanian or in German (the Jews from Bukovina). Although slightly known in 2014’s Romania, but highly valued and praised in Israel where he was nicknamed "the senior of the Romanian writers", the journalist and writer Marius Mircu was part of the elite group of Jewish intellectuals. His contribution to the preservation of the Jewish history in Romania (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) is still valued by the Jewish community. Marius Mircu’s cultural identity has been created by the blending of three cultures: Jewish, Romanian, and French (he lived and studied in France between 1929 and 1932). Through this study we aim to clarify if the writer was haunted by the anxieties of his cultural identities.

 

Conclusions: Romanians, as well as the Jews in Romania, were really fortunate to have in their service a personality so complex and well-balanced as Marius Mircu. Born and raised in a bicultural community (half Romanian and half Jewish), Marius Mircu learned from early childhood integration and assimilation that over time turned him into a personality with a great potential to represent both cultures in his writings. His dual identity was not a handicap for him; on the contrary, it gave him a vantage point from which he was able to observe, to extract the essential and to give back a wise and colorful picture of the humanity he lived in. He built a bridge between the two communities, dedicating his talent and energy to the cause of love and understanding among peoples. He did it in both languages, for both cultures. A gifted human being, he lived to write and he wrote to live.

Courtesy: Biblioteca Digitala a Bucurestilor

ÉMANCIPATION - Êtes-vous (aussi) de Czernowitz? • EMANCIPATION - Are you (also) from Czernowitz?

 

 

For his lifetime achievements Charles Rosner (1941 - 2013) was awarded by the French Republic with the National Order of the Legion of Honour, the highest decoration in France. At the award-giving ceremony in Monaco in 2001 Charles Rosner was not yet aware, that he would later write his memoirs. But his award-receiving speach anticipated this exercise. After the usual courtesy formulas, he came to say the following:

"This hour is my hour... and I dedicate it to Memory. Memory of the Past, to start with my parents. It is of good taste to mention one’s parents on similar occasions. As for me, it is neither tradition nor good taste, which drive me: it is the emotion. An emotion that grips the chest of the only son I was, with what I know of the history of my family, and with the memory of the sacrifices that my parents so naturally carried out, without even thinking of it, so that I could live a different life than the one they had known... My parents, who would have been so proud to be there today, on such an occasion. To my father and mother I say: this medal and this acknowledgement are yours!

Memory of the Past, also, with my 'friends for fifty years': you, whom I met in sixth grade at the Lyceum and who became my brothers and my family in France for so many years. Memory of the Past, as well, with all those I admired and who taught me so much. You were the spiritual parents of a part of myself, for some during my childhood, for others when already an adult, in both my private and professional lives. Today, I want to thank you, even if you cannot hear me.And Memory of the Present, to start with my wife Marie-France. When we met, I had already struck out any positive development for my private life. It’s thanks to you, and even more so, that we have been able to build a family and a home of which we can be proud. And it’s together that we struggled and made the most of it; it’s together that we traveled; it’s together that we conquered new horizons each time. And it’s together that we confronted the happiness and misfortunes of life. To you, my partner, I say: This medal is yours! And you gave me a new family, to start with 'Belle-Maman': as I often say, I wish to every man to understand as well with his mother-in-law as I enjoy understanding with mine! This new and enlarged family that 'Beau-Papa' envelops into a Provencal sunshine, and of which the new generation symbolizes so well the children of the 'Good Book'! To you, Marie-France, I again say: this medal is yours! Memory of the Present also, with all my friends and colleagues at work. In a few months, it will be thirty years that we reciprocally accept and appreciate each other. Sometimes, this was a difficult exercise for me, but always an exciting one, an exercise having its tense and satisfactory moments, as well as its times of common efforts. Together, we represent our Great Firm in the world. And, if I sometimes have a feeling that I gave a lot, I know that the reverse is also true. […]

To all of you, friends and colleagues from the past and the present, I say: Thank you! And finally, Memory for the Future, for my children. May this ceremony, and the recognition it represents for me, the son of immigrants and an immigrant myself, remain in your memory. To you, my three children, I say: always give the best of yourself, live consciously, and this medal will be yours!"

Courtesy: David Rosner 

Der Franziszeische Kataster im Kronland Bukowina • The Land Register of Francis I in the Crownland of Bukovina

 

The Land Register of Francis I (1817 – 1861) is a comprehensive cartographical and statistical documentation of the natural, economic and social circumstances surrounding the Habsburg monarchy in the first half of the 19th century.  The measurement, soil assessment and earning power of all crown lands and the arrangement in tax districts and 30,556 land registry districts was a great technical and cultural-political achievement at a time after the Napoleonic Wars in which the Austrian monarchy had reached a new low. Since January of 2008 the Universities of Klagenfurt and Innsbruck have been working on a research project (funded with the support of the Austrian Scientific Fund – FWF) whose aim is to scientifically develop and examine the maps and records of the states of Carinthia and Bukovina. [...] 

The layout of the Land Register of Francis I (with its fiscal, judicial and political objectives) sought to bring together the provinces of the union of states into a uniform jurisdiction regarding soil assessment and taxation.  As a basic part of the development of a more or less unified economic area, the “Franziszeische Surveying Unit” in conjunction with the “land registry” and the “soil assessment” had the goal of viewing the “tax assessment” (which did not take place) as an undertaking to reshape a large region economically, administratively and judicially.  For this reason the “land registry” was an important step towards a “modern state” – in the case of the Habsburg monarchy this was definitely without and against the ideological support of nationalism taking place during the start of the 19th century. In its political meaning the research into the land registry has up until now been largely ignored. There has been almost no adequate consideration for the land registry in the overall view of the Austrian management, economic and social history. The missing editorial coverage of the land registry as a source for comparison studies is a drawback whose elimination should provide new impulse to the research with a middle European perspective.

Courtesy: OAPEN Open Access

The Making of Soviet Chernivtsi • National “Reunification,” World War II, and the Fate of Jewish Czernowitz in Postwar Ukraine

Abstract: This dissertation revisits the meaning of Soviet expansion and sovietization during and after World War II, the effects of the war on a multiethnic Central-Eastern European city, and the postwar construction of a national identity. One of several multiethnic cities acquired by the USSR in the course of World War II, modern pre-Soviet Chernivtsi can be best characterized as a Jewish-German city dominated by acculturated Jews until the outbreak of World War II. Yet Chernivtsi emerged from the war, the Holocaust, and Soviet reconstruction as an almost homogeneous Ukrainian city that allegedly had always longed for reunification with its Slavic brethren. Focusing on the late Stalinist period (1940–1953) but covering earlier (1774–1940) and later (1953–present) periods, this study explores the relationship between the ideas behind the incorporation; the lived experience of the incorporation; and the historical memory of the city’s distant and recent past. Central to this dissertation is the fate of the Jewish residents of Czernowitz-Chernivtsi. This community was diminished from an influential plurality to about one percent of the city’s population whose past was marginalized in local historical memory. This study demonstrates a multifaceted local experience of the war which was all but silenced by the dominant Soviet Ukrainian myth of the Great Patriotic War and the 'reunification of all Ukrainian lands.' When the authors of the official Soviet historical and cultural narratives represented Stalin’s annexation as the 'reunification' of Ukraine, they in fact constructed and popularized a new concept of 'historical Ukrainian lands.' This concept—a blueprint for the Soviet colonization of the western borderlands in the name of the Ukrainian nation—tied ethnically defined Ukrainian culture to a strictly delineated national territory. Applied to the new borderlands and particularly to their urban centres characterized by cultural diversity, this policy served to legitimize the marginalization and, in several cases, the violent displacement of ethnic minorities, bringing to an end Jewish Czernowitz."

Courtesy: Dr. Svitlana Frunchak

Für Volkes Ehr' und Wohl! • For Peoples' Honor and Wellbeing!

History of the J.N.A.V. Hasmonaea in Czernowitz by Adolf Koenig (Tel Aviv): "On July 14, 1891 Hasmonaea was founded in Czernowitz. The founding preceded a meeting of several Jewish academicians. In a small room in the dwelling of Chief Rabbi, Dr. Lazar Igel on Landhausgasse, the so-called Boxwood House, opposite the elementary school, a small group of 10 or 12 students, inspired by the Jewish national spirit meet to form a Jewish academic association. The students were: Mayer Ebner, who already as a high school student was the leader of a group which fought against the ruling stream of assimilation, Isak Schmierer who later was chosen as one of the leaders, Philipp Menczel, Julian Sternberg from Suceava and his brother Adolf, Paul Rieber who already at that time was a deep thinker, Blum, Leonhard Gerbel who later studied medicine, Nachum Feuerstein, later a doctor in Czernowitz, Michael Feuerstein who was later know as a 'man of letters' in Austria, Burstyn, the son of the Siret Rabbi, Reinisch Ebner who became a lawyer, Josef Bierer and Siegmund Neuberger who both became doctors in Czernowitz.