Death of a Lifestyle: The Street Life of Bucharest’s Jewish Neighborhoods
Death of a Lifestyle: The Street Life of Bucharest’s Jewish Neighborhoods

Summary/Abstract: In the Jewish neighborhoods of Bucharest, public spaces were often used as places of both commercial and religious ritual. On the one hand, due to the legal restrictions allowing them access to a very limited number of professions, Jews were in general both craftsmen and merchants, selling their own products. They usually did that from small houses, where they would have a tiny store at the front and a cramped lodging at the back, but many were in fact even poorer than that (contrary to the usual stereotype) and were forced to sell their merchandise in the street, in famous places like Taica Lazăr, which led to the emergence of a genuine street lifestyle. On the other hand, many Jewish holidays and traditions were celebrated by default out in the street, together with the entire community, and not in the intimacy of one’s home, which was often too small. Therefore, several times a year ancient religious rituals were brought to life in these public spaces.This study presents the two different types of ritual, “commercial” and “religious,”which filled the public spaces of the old Jewish neighborhoods of Bucharest until World War II, when this lifestyle was destroyed forever first by the Holocaust and then by communism.To this end it looks at literary descriptions, photographic images, newspaper articles,advertisements and archival material depicting the activities that took place on the “Jewish streets” for centuries, until they were brought up to an abrupt end in mid-20th century.

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