Brick phantoms

In early March 2011 I returned to Czernowitz. The Cyrillic alphabet, the marks of the Soviet Union in everyday life, visible in cars and intercoms, the concerns of the people regarding their harsh daily life - all of this contrasts with the architecture of the city center - Austrian and Romanian heritage - as if that setting had absolutely nothing to do with the theater play that is now being represented.

Except the Romanian minority, which deplores even today, but silently, the loss of northern Bukovina and its capital Czernowitz to the former Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine at the end of World War II, the rest of the population seems unaware - and why should it be otherwise? - of inhabiting places that once shaped perhaps the most cosmopolitan city within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its unique cultural effervescence.

I saw the Great Synagogue [picture above], built in the first half of the 19th century in a typical Galitian style, in the center of the old Jewish quarter, on Henry Barbusse street, now hosting a shop of doors and windows and other small businesses inside the backyard, such as a trade in crosses for cemeteries. The current owner seems to be treating well his property, even keeping a Hebrew inscription found above the main entrance. Since 1865, when the Jewish quarter was destroyed by fire, the synagogue has generated many legends about its miraculous power to come out unscathed amid the flames. 

Behind it lie the ruins of a Jewish hospital [photo] built in the 1930s thanks to the donation of the famous German-Jewish tenor Joseph Schmidt, born in Bukovina in 1904.

Lost shtetl in Bukovina

During the month of May 2009 I was twice in Cârlibaba in order to carry out a research about the families Jacob and Schapira. The small and picturesque town in today's Suceava county, also known as Kirlibaba under Austrian rule (1774-1918), when it stood at the border between Transylvania and Bukovina, was a prosperous shtetl thanks to its activities in the field of manganese and wood extraction. After the end of WWII, most of the surviving Jews emigrated. Not a single Jew lives today in Cârlibaba. The synagogue was demolished, the ritual butchery is in ruins and the old cemetery (picture) can be hardly kept by a Christian neighbor who takes care of it out of pity.

The 5-language city

In July 2009 I visited once again Cernauti (Чернівці, Czerniowce, Czernowitz, Tschernowitz, Chernivtsi), former capital of Bukovina (1775-1918), the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Today, together with Lviv, it is the main cultural center of western Ukraine. Named as Little Vienna, the city still keeps alive the Austrian atmosphere, mainly thanks to the works carried out to celebrate, in 2008, the 600 years of its first documentary mention. In the picture [by the author], the cinegogue, how it is popularly known the cinema hall installed in the old building's central synagogue, a striking testimony of the former Jewish presence.

With the end of World War I, Cernauti became part of the territory of Romania. According to data from the 1930 census, from the 113,000 inhabitants of this city, possibly the most multiethnic one in Central and Eastern Europe, 43,000 were Jews who lived in harmony with Romanians, Germans, Ukrainians and Poles. More than half of the Jewish population was decimated during World War II by the regime of Marshal Antonescu, in collaboration with Nazi Germany. With the establishment of Soviet rule in 1944, when the northern part of Bukovina became part of Soviet Ukraine, Jews, Germans, Romanians, Poles and Ukrainians were deported, the city was repopulated with people deeply connected to Russian culture come from different regions of the Soviet Union.

The current population, according to the census of 2001, amount to 240,000 inhabitants, among them 1,300 Jews. Throughout its history, the city welcomed and gave birth to great personalities of Jewish origin, such as Rose Ausländer, Paul Celan, Joseph Schmidt, Karl Emil Franzos, Abraham Goldfaden, Nathan Birnbaum, Alfred Margulis-Sperber, Wilhelm Reich and Joseph Schumpeter.

Lying 35km from Siret, at the Romanian border, the city and its surroundings are a major tourist attraction with many historical monuments that bear witness to its rich multicultural past.

Novoselytsya

In August 2009 I was in Noua Suliţă (Suliţa Târg, Suliţa, Novoselytsya, Новоселиця, Новоселица, Nowoselyzja, Nowosielica, Nowosielitza), in the historic region of Bessarabia, since 1991 in the territory of independent Ukraine, near the border with Romania, where I visited the large and ancient Jewish cemetery site [see my picture].

On the banks of the Prut River, Novoselytsya was first mentioned in a document in 1456, having belonged to the Principality of Moldova until 1812. With the transfer of Bessarabia to the Russian Empire, its eastern half went under Russian rule, while its western half, since 1775, belonged to the Austro-Hungarian province of Bukovina.

In 1905, the local train station was inaugurated, along an existing line from the last quarter of the 19th century and which became the main transit point for cattle leather exported to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The station became famous thanks to the famous American journalist John Reed, who started there, in 1915, his trip to Russia in order to witness the Bolshevik Revolution.

With the end of World War I, the whole city became part of Romanian territory and, with World War II, of the Soviet Union.

In 1930, the city, the second largest in the Romanian province of Hotin and important commercial center, had a population of 5000 inhabitants, of whom about four-fifths were Jews. The city had several banks, a Jewish hospital, a synagogue, a post office and telegraph, a commercial high school, a court, two cinemas and airport.

Currently the city has around 8000 inhabitants, of whom about half a dozen Jewish families.

Understanding the borders

One of the first problems of genealogical research is to geographically locate the roots of the family. Having been Eastern Europe the scene of continuous and several military conflicts, some confusion is common.

The map beside (click it to enlarge) may explain more than any text that seeks to establish the borders of Bessarabia, Moldavia and Bukovina.

It corresponds entirely to the historical territory of Moldavia, during the time it was a principality until the 19th century, when, uniting with Wallachia, they formed together Romania.

The blue part belongs, since the end of World War II, to Romania (Moldavia and southern Bukovina). The pink part belongs to Ukraine today (northern Bukovina, northern Bessarabia, Herta and Budjak) and the green part is the territory of Republic of Moldova.

As one can see, Bessarabia itself is formed by the green and two pink zones, north and south, territories detached by Khrushchev out of the SSR Moldova and then transferred to the SSR Ukraine. 

 

Bukovina (Austrian province between 1775 and 1918) is now split between Romania and Ukraine. The area shaded in green corresponds to the self-proclaimed Republic of Transnistria, an area of great geopolitical tension between Russia and NATO, while the area shaded with pink, now part of Ukrainian territory, corresponds to the former Moldavian Autonomous SSR (1924-1940), Stalinist complex maneuver in geopolitics.