Tag #123727 - Interview #78460 (Isac Tinichigiu)

Iasi, the town I grew up in, was a beautiful and modern town, but we lived more on what one would call the outskirts, in a neighborhood called Ticau. It is famous in Romanian literature because this is where Creanga was born. [Ion Creanga (1839-1889): famous Romanian writer] There were no ghettos, but there were neighborhoods where Jews were very numerous, such as Cucului. The Jewish community in Iasi was big and powerful; it must have been more than a third of the town’s population, maybe about 30,000 Jews. There were a lot of synagogues and prayer houses, with rabbis, chazzanim, shochetim and all other functionaries. Since the community was so big, of course we had mikves, cheders and yeshivot. About half of the Jews in Iasi worked in factories or in different shops. A lot of them had their own workshops, because many were skilled woodworkers, watchmakers, shoemakers and so on.