Tales and Traces of Sephardic Bucharest

Tales and Traces of Sephardic Bucharest is meant to be an open door to a world that nowadays seems drawn from a fairy tale, a beginning, a first step designed to incite the reader’s curiosity and convince him or her, regardless of whether he or she is an expert or just someone interested in the city’s history, to start looking for more sources and information about the presence and contribution of the Sephardim (as well as the Ashkenazim, and the other minorities) to the development and modernization of Bucharest. In the current cultural movement bent on recovering the Romanian capital’s history, with numerous articles, book and albums appearing at an impressive pace, the efforts (and implicitly the results) would be incomplete if they did not take into account this aspect, which is in some respects indispensable, considering that in some fields Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews were road openers.

Old and new images, success stories and accounts about characters that once populated Sephardic Bucharest are set before the reader so that by organizing them in various combinations he or she may get an overall picture of this world, which is today only virtual, but which is still too beautiful to be forgotten. For it is not just the synagogues and community buildings that have disappeared, but also the Sephardim themselves; of those who once represented the majority of Bucharest’s Jews, so few are left now that one can almost count them on one’s fingers. This book is dedicated to them.