front page for Jewish Communities in Romania

I think that would be terrific if you took on the task of improving the front page. Thanks so much.

Randy

I would organize definitely by regions which reflect the very diverse cultural background of Romanian Jewish population for the genealogical period of interest. First the Old Kingdom with its two components : the very large, with mostly Galician/Podolian origin (Poland pre 1800 partition) with major centers like Iasi and Botosani and Wallachia populated mostly by people coming South from Moldova to Bucuresti, Ploiesti, etc. Also with important Sephardic communities near Danube River and Bucharest. Special case there is Dobrogea where Jews became citizens earlier than post WW1 due to their Ottoman history. Second the Transylvanian Jews, largely Magyarized (in Cluj, Oradea etc) or of German culture (in Sibiu or Brasov); also with the distinct Maramures hasidic communities (Sighet). Finally the Bukovina (Cernauti, Suceava, etc) and partially Banat (Timisoara) with Austrian influence. A separate case could be made for Bessarabia (Chisinau, Bender, Ismail, Tighina) , in Romania 1919 to 1940 with major Russian cultural influence due to post 1812 belonging to Russian Empire. These distinctions are reflected in different names employed by Jews and also for research where quite different sources may be available.

Eric H Mercer
The Botosani research group of which Luc Radu and myself are members have acquired and indexed about 150 thousands Jewish records from the Romanian-Moldova area, mainly from Botosani county but also from Falticeni, Vaslui and Husi.
We can be contacted at https://www.facebook.com/groups/1465078043774333/

There should most certainly be links to the Rom-SIG of JewishGen! There are currently many thousands of records online on that site. And many more thousands awaiting volunteers to help us get all of those data online also! You can help by contacting our Research Coordinator, Barbara Hershey at :< Barbara.Hershey@comcast.net > or me, if you would like to help with that enormous project.

I've completed my research and have started the rewrite and organization of the front page, which will continue to completion within a few days. The new page is forming below the old one, which will be removed at the end of the process. I've preserved the original page on a document associated with this project.

I have sketched out the sections in place, provided an intro to geographical regions, listed the regions as sub-sections, and started the tedious process of placing cities within their respective sub-section (beginning with the most populous). Besides filling in the major sections as laid out, including links to outside resources, I'll also add an appropriate map or two.

The next news update will probably be when it's done, but if there are comments/suggestions/critiques as I go along then we'll discuss those.

You've done lots of work.
Some remarks :

A. Botosani county was not a part of Bucovina and isn't considered a part of Bucovina.
B. There's a list of places - it's a mixture between counties and localities.

You use the map of 1930 - which is not relevant today.
Muntenia is not a part of Wallachia.
In Romania Muntenia = Wallachia = Țara Românească
Some of its internal divisions - like Oltenia are given by the map you use as equal.

The umbrella page is starting to look gorgeous! Thanks so much for working on this. Randy

Just joined - My Grandparents on my Mother's side were from Tasnad - which was part of Hungary when they were born in the late 1800s. I was able to get my GM's birth record from the archives in Satu Mare, where those records are kept. I also have pages from the birth and marriage records from Tasnad as scanned by a researched I used. I am anxious to connect or find out more from anyone with knowledge and experience regarding Tasnad.

Sorin, thank you for the feedback. My thoughts...

Botoşani: I took the list of modern counties for each historical region from the "Geographical Regions for the JewishGen Romania Database” page here ( http://www.jewishgen.org/databases/Romania/RomaniaRegions.htm ), which has assigned the modern counties of Botoşani, Suceav to the historical region of Bucovina in their listing and their map. But the JewishGen Communities/Town Finder actually says the town of Botoşani is/was in Moldavia, and I've confirmed it with several sources, so that's an error on their page and map. I've corrected it on ours and will send their page maintainer a note.

Muntenia: By my research, Muntenia is also called Greater Wallachia or just "Wallachia proper," and Oltenia is also called Lesser Wallachia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntenia ). But when you go back a few centuries, the name Wallachia combined the two and Oltenia was a small western part of it. So historically "Wallachia" meant both combined. That was also true when Wallachia and Moldavia joined to form the Romanian Old Kingdom. The maps are trying to "assign" modern counties to old regions and they sort of but don't entirely fit, so "Olternia" looks a bit bigger on those maps than it mostly was considered to be. I will try to come up with a brief way to address all this in the one-line summaries I've given each region.

Map of 1930: The JewishGen database records are mostly 1900-1945 or so, and refer to counties that appear on those maps. There were two main waves of Jewish emigration: pre-WWII mostly to the U.S. and post-WWII to the U.S. and especially Israel. My ancestors happen to be pre-WWII emigrants and the 1930s maps are very relevant -- and it's also harder to find free good ones so I've shared those. Maps of post-WWII counties are easier to find, and several of the links I gave lead to them. But I'll look for one to add to the page.

Eric
I was born in Romania and learned history in Romania - although left as a child. So no one thinks of Muntenia as a different entity from Wallachia. And Oltenia is just a part of Wallachia and not equal.
When people are looking for records - today - the important thing is where the records are kept - and they are kept according to the modern day administrative division.
Last remark - our group has 150 thousands civil state records + others. Mainly from Botosani county - but not just. It is one of the most important resources for Jewish genealogy in Romania.
BTW - for the Transilvanian part - many records can be found at the Hungarian-Sig (which is the more natural home).

The list of places is to some extent a hodge-podge -- towns and large villages (Marculesti, Bivolari, Orasu Nou, Raducaneni) mixed, and major "Jewish" places are missing. I guess this was based to existing "projects" to be linked to. Still for balance following places should be added : Baia Mare, Bistrita, Borsa, Buhusi, Burdujeni, Carei, Darabani,Fagaras, Focsani, Giurgiu, Husi, Sfantu Gheorghe, Stefanesti*, Saveni*, Turda, Targul Secuiesc, Turnu Severin, Vaslui, Vatra Dornei, Viseul de Sus (this is not a complete list, just on top of my head...). One suggestion for places in Transylvania which may be known by descendants by their Hungarian or German names -- could be added.

Luc... The places listed in my version of the page are just the places listed in the former version plus a couple more that I found projects for. They are the places with Geni projects, with no implication for what sort of a place they are or how important they were in the Romanian Jewish community. Other than, I guess, important enough that someone here decided to create a project for that place! It's not a complete list, nor is that the intention. But I feel that one purpose of this page, beyond simply being a list of links, is to encourage people to create new, appropriate projects if they are going to support and grow them (e.g. projects for the regions). So to help provide encouragement for that I've added the towns you listed, though not as links because there are no projects for those places yet.

Sorin, I need to think more on what changes should be made to the page given what you've said, while reconciling with how the JewishGen databases are in practice structured, and what's shown on maps and in written histories, so that things are clear, correct, and concise while effectively guiding people to the information they are looking for.

I did a review of projects here at Geni with "Romania" or "Romanian" in their titles or descriptions and added links to a few appropriate ones that weren't on the earlier page version. I'm continuing to make modifications to the page, with more over the next few days, although I believe the bulk of the needed work has been done.

I noticed some of the "projects" are just stubs with no data or simply unrelated to the subject (e.g. Katz). I think the map you added is fine since includes "before and after" information with all significant data. Perhaps a map for the time of the greatest emigration wave to US (pre WW1) would be also of interest.

Yes, many (perhaps even most) of the projects could be called stubs. One purpose of this rewrite to to help encourage a little more activity by making the page more helpful and more inviting to people and search engines.

I believe every linked project is related to the subject. I annotated the line for the one you mentioned -- adding "Katz Families of Bucovina" -- as the name alone certainly suggested it was unrelated.

I hopefully modified the concise annotations for the regions of Muntenia and Oltenia to address Sorin's points. I also added a quartet of small (but enlargable) maps to the history section that should provide some additional clarity, and also illustrate the major border changes during the genealogical time period up to the end of WWII.

I feel like I'm very close to being finished for now. The page isn't "perfect" but I feel it represents a good compromise between the goals of serving as a path to find relevant Geni projects, and -- with genealogists in mind -- being organized and providing brief, clear and useful additional information.

Eric...I believe overall it looks quite professional. I have only two small observations. First the large increase in Jewish population clearly started decades before 1850 from former Polish Commonwelaths lands, then Austrian and Russian. 60,000 to 70000 from 1825 to 1838 and to 195000 in 1859, primarily in Moldavia. The ruler Mihail Sturdza (1834-1849) had such a reputation that a popular poem said, "Mihai Sturzea, lunga ghiara/ A bagat jidanii'n tara". Among my 2nd great grandparents most were in Moldavia by 1850. The second, the term genocide should not be used for the entirety of Romania since may confuse 2nd or 3rd generation Americans (recently a correspondent wrote me that her relatives survived the Holocaust -- but they lived in Bucharest!). Shoah took place in Bessarabia, Bucovina and Transnistria with Romanian active participation and in N Transylvania under German/Hungarian one. The exception in the old kingdom were the 1940/1941 pogroms in Bucuresti, Dorohoi and Iasi.

Luc, I modified the text around "genocide" to be more accurate. The "history" section is taken nearly verbatim from the referenced Wikipedia article's intro, but that article later makes clear the mass deportations and genocide were limited to specific regions, with pogroms elsewhere as you said. I made modifications that I believe will let this project's paragraph could stand on its own

Could you please point me toward your source for early 1800s Jewish population changes? I have not found any population information from before 1866. I ask not just for this population issue, but mostly because I am interested in where scholarly information about 1800s Jewish Romania in general can be found.

Eric -- see the History of Jews in Romania / Wikipedia listed in your write-up.

Re: "genocide of Bessarabia, Bukovina and Dorohoi populations as part of the Holocaust, and pogroms elsewhere". Dorohoi pogrom in July 1940 - up to 200 Jews killed, Bucuresti pogrom in January 1941 - 125 and the Iasi pogrom of June 1941 - over 13,000.