History of the Jews in Bukovina

The Jews in Bukovina have been an integral part of their community. Under Austria-Hungary, there was tolerance of Jews and inter-ethnic cooperation.

Life under Austria and Romania According to the Romanian-Israeli historian Moshe Idel, Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, was born in the Principality of Moldavia, in the area that would later become Bukovina.

Bukovina was conquered by the Austrian Archduchy in 1774. It developed into one of the most diverse provinces in the Archduchy and later in the Austrian Empire; it was also the province with one of the highest Jewish populations.

The first Austrian census reported a population of 526 Jewish families. As immigration from Galicia, Moldova, and Ukraine grew, the Austrian authorities began to deport the newcomers. Some laws against Jews were revoked in the 1810s. There was a gradual elimination of discrimination of Jews after the 1848 revolution, leading up to all laws against them being removed in 1867. Many of the Jews in Bukovina, along with Germans, immigrated to North America in the late 19th and early 20th century. Despite this, Austria's census reported over 12% Jewish population in Bukovina. When Austria-Hungary collapsed in 1918, Romania took control of Bukovina. In the early 1920s, state posts began to require native Romanian language skills. This law served to legitimize further anti-Semitic legislation. In the late 1930s under Romania, the citizenship of 8.54% of Bukovina's Jews was revoked for alleged fraud by antisemitic governments in 1937–1939, which was the lowest in the territories that became a part of Romania in 1918 (outside the Old Kingdom).The statistics on the loss of Romanian citizenship may be found int Federatia Comunitatilor Evreiesti din Romania/Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania, Centrul pentru Studiul Istoriei Evreilor din Romania/Center for the Study of the History of Jews in Romania, Evreii din Romania intre anii 1940-1944, Vol 1, Legislatia Antievreiasca/The Jews in Romania Between 1940-1944 Years, Vol I, Anti-Jewish Legislation, Prefata: Sef Rabin Dr. Moses Rosen/Preface: Chief Rabbi Dr. Moses Rosen, Volum Alcatuit de Lya Bejamin/Edited by Lya Benjamin, Bucuresti, Edura Hasefer, 1993/Bucharest: Editura Hasefer, 1993, p. 36. Overall, 36.5% of Romania's Jewish population lost its Romanian citizenship in the process, including 61.61% of the Jewish population of Bessarabia, 17.96% in Transylvania and 21.47% in Banat.The statistics on the loss of Romanian citizenship may be found int Federatia Comunitatilor Evreiesti din Romania/Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania, Centrul pentru Studiul Istoriei Evreilor din Romania/Center for the Study of the History of Jews in Romania, Evreii din Romania intre anii 1940-1944, Vol 1, Legislatia Antievreiasca/The Jews in Romania Between 1940-1944 Years, Vol I, Anti-Jewish Legislation, Prefata: Sef Rabin Dr. Moses Rosen/Preface: Chief Rabbi Dr. Moses Rosen, Volum Alcatuit de Lya Bejamin/Edited by Lya Benjamin, Bucuresti, Edura Hasefer, 1993/Bucharest: Editura Hasefer, 1993, p. 35. Like Germany's Jews, they were additionally sent to forced-labor camps.

Soviet occupation and Axis period The Soviet Union occupied the northern part of Bukovina on 3 July 1940. Some communist and pro-Soviet Jews, as well as other minority inhabitants (e.g., Ukrainians) attacked ethnic Romanians and the retreating Romanian soldiers.https://adevarul.ro/locale/suceava/holocaustulrosu-bucovina-basarabia-doua-milioane-romani-victime-ororilor-comise-comunisti-1_577a67d45ab6550cb88c9650/index.htm1 As Romanian troops retreated from the area, they carried out a pogrom against the local Jews in Dorohoi. The Romanian authorities saw the pogrom as a revenge for the crimes committed by the communists in the territories annexed by the Soviets.

Many inhabitants were deported to Siberia from that region following the Soviet takeover, including a disproportionate number of Jews. According to the authoritative estimate of Dov Levin, the top expert in the history of the Jews in the territories occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939–1940, from 1995 with which Jean Ancel concurred in 1998, the number of Bukovinian Jews who were deported to Soviet Asia in June 1941 was 5,000, together with 10,000 from Bessarabia; about half of those from Bessarabia survived and returned to Bessarabia according to a source mentioned by Jean Ancel (Matatias Carp), the specialist on the Holocaust in Romania and Transnistria; however, Carp's estimate is not confirmed by other sources.See Dov Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern European Jewry Under Soviet Rule, 1939-1941 (Philadelphia and Jerusalem, The Jewish Publication Society, 5755/1995), p. 265-266.See Jean Ancel, Transnistria (Bucuresti: Atlas, 1998), vol. 3 (in Romanian), p. 301 on how half of the Bessarabian Jewish deportees survived and later returned to Bessarabia.Ungureanu, Constantin (2021). "Represiunile din regiunea Cernăuți în perioada iunie 1940 – iunie 1941". Revista de Istorie a Moldovei (1–2): 63-65. A number of at least 4,000 of the Bukovinian Jews deported to Siberia by the Soviet in 1941 were from Chernivtsi according to Jean Ancel in 1990; hundreds were from the provincial towns.Jean Ancel, "Bukovina", in Israel Gutman (editor in Chief), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990), vol. 1, p. 262. According to Dr. Avigdor Schachan, who wrote a book about the Transnistrian ghettos, and was himself brought up in the Bessarabian part of the present-day Chernivtsi Oblast of Ukraine, about 2,000 northern Bukovinian and 4,000 Bessarabian Jews were deported to the Soviet east.Avigdor Shachan, Burning Ice: The Ghettos of Transnistria (Boulder, Colorado, Eastern European Monographs, Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1996),:p. 28, 30. The number of inhabitants of the Chernivtsi Oblast who were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan was 7,720 (2,279 families).Ungureanu, Constantin (2021). "Represiunile din regiunea Cernăuți în perioada iunie 1940 – iunie 1941". Revista de Istorie a Moldovei (1–2): 60. According to some sources, most of the deportees of June 1941 from the Chernivtsi oblast, who were of many ethnicities, did not return from the Soviet east.See, for example, Ion Popescu and Constantin Ungureanu, Romanii din Ucraina - intre trecut si viitor, vol. 1 (Romanii din Regiunea Cernauti), Cernauti, 2005, p. 160. However, the fragmentary, locality-by-locality, evidence indicates that most of the deportees from 1941 survived. In his 2011 book on the Holocaust in Romania, Ancel noted that "thousands" of Chernivtsi Jews were deported to Siberia.Jean Ancel, The History of the Holocaust in Romania (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press and Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, 2011), p. 271. According to some sources, most of the deportees from the Chernivtsi oblast of all ethnicities to the Soviet north and east died. However, the fragmentary, locality-by-locality, evidence indicates that most of the deportees from 1941 survived. Only 1,136 of those deported from the Izmail oblast were still alive in Western Siberia, in the Tomsk region, in 1951.Nikolai Bougai, The Deportation of Peoples in the Soviet Union (New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 1996), p. 158.

On June 22, 1941, the Axis invaded the Soviet Union and Northern Bukovina was reoccupied in June–July 1941. At least 5,000 to 10,000 Bukovinian Jews, as well as at least 45,000-50,000 Bessarabian Jews, at least 50,000-60,000 Jews from the ex-Romanian areas overall, escaped into the Soviet interior from the Axis invasion.Dov Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern European Jewry Under Soviet Rule, 1939-1941 (Philadelphia and Jerusalem, The Jewish Publication Society, 5755/1995), p. 336. Perhaps as many as 100,000 to 130,000 Jews from Bessarabia and northern Bukovina left with the Soviets (including the deportees), including 124,000 according to Radu Ioanid.See Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of the Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), p. 171-172.

The Romanian recovery of northern Bukovina, Bessarabia and Hertsa had a disastrous effect on the Jewish population, as the invading German and Romanian soldiers immediately began to massacre Jews. Thousands of Bukovinian Jews (perhaps as many as 10,000) were killed by Romanian and German soldiers, by Einsatzgruppe D (a German SS mobile killing unit specialized in killing Jews and Communists in the territories of the former Soviet Union), as well as ethnic Ukrainian (a majority of the population) and Romanian northern Bukovinian civilians, before the deportations to Transnistria.Yitzak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), p. 230-233. The estimate of 10,000 appears on p. 233. The number of Jews who were killed in Bukovina was 8,500 according to the Yad Vashem database, with names included. The number of Jews who were killed in the city of Chernivtsi itself was 3,372 according to the Yad Vashem database, with names included. Most of these Jews were killed by the German Einsatzgruppe D.See Jean Ancel, "Chernovtsy", in Israel Gutman (editor in Chief), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990), vol. 1, p. 287. The total number of Chernivtsi Jews killed by the SS (Einsatzgruppe D) in July and August 1941 was 3,106 according to the Einsatzgruppe reports, while the Romanians killed 400, though survivor testimonies suggest that perhaps more people were killed.Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939-1945 (New York: A.S. Barnes & Company, Inc., 1961), p. 398. In a July 18, 1941, memorandum to Romania's military dictator Ion Antonescu, the National Peasants' Party leader Iuliu Maniu protested in two paragraphs against the massacres of Bessarabian and northern Bukovinian Jews as well as the Iasi pogrom.See Iuliu Maniu's July 18, 1941, memorandum to Ion Antonescu in Ion Calafeteanu (ed.), Iuliu Maniu - Ion Antonescu, Opinii si Confrontari Politice, 1940 - 1944 (Cluj-Napoca, Editura Dacia, 1994) p. 80.

The survivors were forced into ghettos, awaiting their transfer to work camps in Transnistria; the deportations took place in the fall of 1941. On October 4, 1941, the Romanian Supreme General Staff sent an order to the Cernauti Military Command that indicated that Romania's military dictator Ion Antonescu had ordered the deportation to the east of the Dniester of the Jews of Bukovina, meaning the geographical/historical province, and not the expanded Guvernamantul Bucovinei.Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of the Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), p. 155. At the request of military dictator Ion Antonescu, Bukovina's governor, Corneliu Calotescu announced on October 10, 1941, his decision that all the Jews of Cernăuți must be deported to Transnistria by train.Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of the Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), p. 156-157. The Jews of Secureni Camp in Hotin County (a Bessarabian county at that time administratively a part of Bukovina) were evacuated in two groups, on October 2 and 5, while those in Edinet Camp in the same county were evacuated on October 10 and 13, both on foot and in carts rather than by train, based on orders that predated Calotescu's order.Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of the Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), p. 148-149. At his trial in 1945, Calotescu was accused of being responsible for the deportation of 56,000 Jews from Bukovina and of 12,000 Jews from Dorohoi County.Poporul Acuza: Actul de Acuzare, Rechizitoriile, si Replica Acuzarii in Procesul Primului Lot de Criminali de Rasboi, (Bucuresti: Editura "Apararii Patricotice", 1945), p. 13.