The history of the Jews in Chișinău dates to the early 1700s, when Chișinău (then known as Kishinev) was located first in Moldavia and later from 1812 onwards in the Bessarabia region of the Russian Empire. Chișinău is now the capital city of Moldova and is the center of the country's Jewish population. As of 2022, around 10,000 of the 15,000 Moldovan Jews reside in Chișinău.

History Chișinău (Keshenev in Yiddish) was historically part of Moldavia. In 1812, the region was annexed by the Russian Empire and became known as Bessarabia. The earliest Jewish presence in Chișinău dates back to the early 18th century. By 1774, Jewish people were 7% of the total population of Chișinău. In 1774, a Jewish burial society was founded in the city with 144 members. A cemetery was established in the early 19th century.

Kishinev pogrom The Kishinev pogrom began on Easter Sunday, April 19, 1903. It was triggered by a news story in the only daily paper in the city, the antisemitic Russian language paper "Bessarabets" ("The Bessarabian') stating that a young boy had been murdered by Jews for using his blood for Passover (an example of the antisemitic blood libel trope). Local commentators say that this pogrom had been planned by the Russian authorities. An estimated 1,500 to 2,000 rioters launched a brutal assault against the Jewish quarter of Kishinev and their 50,000 residents. Mobs committed extreme acts of vandalism, plundering, murder, mutilation and rape, sparing marked Christian homes. The police and the 5,000 soldats stationed in the city let them do. The violence continued until finally the Minister of Interior ordered the dispersal of the mob on April 20 and a martial law on April 21. The pogrom resulted in 49 Jewish deaths, 495 injuries, 2,000 people left homeless and 2.5 million rubles in property damage.

The Kishinev pogrom by its atrocity brought the word pogrom to the world stage, generating international expressions of indignation, including in the U.S.A.. It also deeply impacted the Jewish literature, with for instance a poem "In the City of Slaughter" based on the pogrom survivors' testimonies written by the famous Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik. The pogrom plaid a significant role in convincing Russian Jews to leave Russia for the West and for the land of Palestine.

The Holocaust

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 by the Soviet authorities to the Soviet east in June 1941.Avigdor Shachan, Burning Ice: The Ghettos of Transnistria (Boulder, Colorado, Eastern European Monographs, Distributed by Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 28, 30. From 1941 to 1942, 120,000 Jews from Bessarabia, all of Bukovina, and the Dorohoi county in Romania proper, were deported by the Romanian authorities to ghettos and concentration camps in Transnistria, with only a small portion returning in 1944. The number of Jewish deportees to Transnistria sent there in 1941 who reached the latter province included 110,033 people, including 55,867 from Bessarabia, 43,798 from Bukovina, 10,368 from Dorohoi; out of these, 50,741 still survived by September 1, 1943.See Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of the Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), p. 174.Excerpts from the (Romanian) Ministry of Internal Affairs document ("Referat") that provide these numbers may be found in Centrul Pentru Studiul Istoriei Evrilor din Romania ("The Centre for the Study of the History of Romanian Jewry), Martiriul Evreilor din Romania, 1940-1944, Documente si Marturii ("The Martyrdom of the Jews in Romania, 1940-1944: Documents and Testimonies"), with a foreword by Dr. Moses Rosen (Bucuresti: Editura Hasefer, 1991), p. 231-232. A further 4,000 Chernivtsi Jews were deported to Transnistria in June 1942. According to the Romanian gendarmerie, on September 1, 1943, 50,741 Jewish deportees survived in Transnistria, including 36,761 from Bukovina, including Dorohoi County (historically a part of the Old Kingdom of Romania, but administratively a part of Bukovina at that time), and 13,980 from Bessarabia.See Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of the Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), p. 205.For a detailed breakdown of the survivors by province of origin (Bessarabia and Bukovina) and county in Transnistria, with data available for all counties of Transnistria except for Odessa, see Jean Ancel, Transnistria (Bucuresti: Atlas, 1998), vol. 3 (in Romanian), p. 290-291. Odessa County was missing. According to the statistics from the office of the Romanian prime minister of November 15, 1943, by province of origin from Romania and of county of residence in Transnistria, in the latter area there were 49,927 Jewish deportees who had survived, including 31,141 from Bukovina (without Dorohoi County, but including Hotin County), 11,683 from Bessarabia (without Hotin County), 6,425 from Dorohoi County, and 678 from the rest of Romania.See Jean Ancel, Transnistria (Bucuresti: Atlas, 1998), vol. 3 (in Romanian), p. 290-291. The data from three counties of Transnistria are missing for the deportees from Bukovina, and from four counties for the deportees from Bessarabia, Dorohoi County and the rest of Romania. According to the foremost Israeli scholarly study on the Holocaust by Leni Yahil, almost 60,000 Jewish deportees survived in Transnistria.See Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945 (New York and Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 594. According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, 55,000 to 60,000 of the Jewish deportees to Transnistria survived the Holocaust.See Jean Ancel, "Transnistria", in Israel Gutman (editor in Chief), Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990), vol. 4, p. 1476. Another estimate of the total number of Bessarabian Jews who survived the deportations to Transnistria was 20,000, which also indicates that a large majority of the deportees died in Transnistria.Siegfried Jagendorf, Jagendorf's Foundry: A Memoir of the Romanian Holocaust, 1941-1944, Edited with Commentary by Aron Hirt-Manheimer (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), p. XXVI. The ones who died did so in the most inhuman and horrible conditions. (In the same ghettos and camps there were many Jews from that region as well, responsibility for whose death lies on the Romanian authorities that occupied it in 1941–44.) According to Wolf Moskovich, Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the article "Bessarabia", in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, "Only a third of the deported Jews survived Transnistria."Wolf Moskovich, "Bessarabia", in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, at https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/50 According to Wolf Moskovich in the same article, "In all, some 100,000 Bessarabian Jews perished during World War II."Wolf Moskovich, "Bessarabia", in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, at https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/50 According to the Yad Vashem database, 60,732 Jews whose names are listed who had lived in Bessarabia before the war were killed during World War II, while 133 died indirectly in relation to the Holocaust.

Wolf Moskovinch wrote about the Holocaust in Chisinau: "In the first days following the German attack on the Soviet Union, many of Kishinev’s 70,000 Jews became victims of the intensive aerial bombardment of the city. Thousands escaped to the east. The returning Romanians showed no mercy to Bessarabian Jews, considering them to be Communists and Russian sympathizers. When the Romanians entered Kishinev on 16 July 1941, they staged a pogrom that continued for several days, and then established a ghetto with more than 11,000 prisoners, some of whom were murdered in the following months; indeed, 837 Jews were executed at the city cemetery. On 4–31 October 1941, the remaining Jews were deported to Transnistria in several groups, followed in May 1942 by the last about 200 Jews deported from the city. On May 20, 1942, 204 Jews from Chisinau were deported to Transnistria, while on July 10, 1942, other 27 Chisinau Jews were deported to Transnistria; the total number of Jews deported by train from Chisinau to Transnistria in 1942 was 231.Jean Ancel, The History of the Holocaust in Romania (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press and Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, 2011), p. 466. Few Jews from Kishinev survived the camps.""Kishinev", by Wolf Moskovich, in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, at https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/366. According to the Yad Vashem database, 5,987 Jews who were living in Chisinau were killed in the city.Yad Vashem Collections - Names - Search Results at https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/names/search-results?page=1&s_place_war_search_en=Chisinau&t_place_war_search_en=yvSynonym. Among the Jews who lived in Chisinau before the war, Yad Vashem has a list of 16,522 who were evacuated to the Soviet east in 1941.Yad Vashem Collections - Names - Search Results at https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/names/search-results?page=1&s_place_permanent_search_en=Chisinau&t_place_permanent_search_en=yvSynonym. The 1941 deportation of the city's Jews (and of Bessarabian Jews as a whole) to Transnistria, which was done by peasant carts and on foot in 1941 (unlike in the case of the Jews of southern Bukovina, Chernivtsi and Dorohoi, which was done by train) reduced its Jewish population from 11,388 in the fall of 1941 to 177 in 1943; a large majority of the deportees died according to Jean Ancel.See Jean Ancel, The History of the Holocaust in Romania (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press and Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, 2011), p. 266-269, with the statistics on p. 269. On May 20, 1942, 204 Jews from Chisinau were deported to Transnistria, while on July 10, 1942, other 27 Chisinau Jews were deported to Transnistria; the total number of Jews deported from Chisinau to Transnistria in 1942 was 231.Jean Ancel, The History of the Holocaust in Romania (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press and Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, 2011), p. 466. The number of Jews from Chisinau (some of whom were Jewish only according to the definition of the Romanian authorities, such as converts to Christianity) who lived in Chisinau in late 1943 was 177.Jean Ancel, The History of the Holocaust in Romania (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press and Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, 2011), p. 269. 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. Iuliu Maniu, the National Peasants' Party leader, condemned the deportations of Jews to Transnistria and he intervened to Ion Antonescu so that the latter would stop the deportations.Ion Calafeteanu (ed.), Iuliu Maniu - Ion Antonescu, Opinii si Confrontari Politice, 1940 - 1944 (Cluj-Napoca, Editura Dacia, 1994), p. 171. On March 14, 1944, Romania's military dictator Ion Antonescu allowed the repatriation of all the Jews deported to Transnistria.Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of the Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), p. 256.