Moineşti (pronounced MOI-nesht) is a small city in north-eastern Romania, in the Moldovan region, and in the county of Bacău. According to Wikipedia,

The name is derived from the Romanian word moină, which means fallow or light rain. Moineşti once had a large Jewish community; in Jewish contexts the name is often given as Mojnescht.

Bordering the Moldovan region to the east is the Republic of Moldova, a country independent of Romania mainly due to tensions with Russia. Russia has occupied the Republic of Moldova since Romania and Russian armed forces fought a brief war in 1992. The Moldovan region (and some parts of Ukraine) are referred to in many sources as Bessarabia — the administrative name for the region in the Russian Empire. Betsy Gidwitz, in her article “The Jews of Moldova” (1998) explains:

Moldova, together with adjoining segments of Ukraine, is often known in Jewish history as Bessarabia - the entire area between the Dniestr and Prut rivers. Jews have lived in the region since the end of the fourteenth century, where they were prominent as merchants, traders, and craftsmen. During parts of the nineteenth century, as many as 230,000 Jews lived in Bessarabia, perhaps one-third of the population in small towns and close to one-half of the population of Kishinev. The country was a center of both Yiddish and Hebrew literature.

In an article, “The Jewish History of Moldova,” Eliyahu Feldman provides some additional context.

After the Russian annexation in 1812, Bessarabia was included in the Pale of Settlement, and many Jews settled there from other parts of the Pale. The Jewish population, mainly concentrated in Kishinev and in the northern part of the region, grew from 43,062 in 1836 to 94,045 in 1867 (excluding New Bessarabia, see below), and to 228,620 (11.8% of the total) in 1897. Of these 109,703 (48%) lived in the towns (of them 50,237, or 22%, in Kishinev), 60,701 (26.5%) in small towns, and 58,216 (25.5%) in the villages. They formed 37.4% of the town population, 55.7% of the population of the small towns, and 3.8% of the village population.

Mentioned as early as 1467, the small village of Moineşti, grew steadily through the 19th century as a regional market town. In 1832, Moineşti had 188 houses and 588 inhabitants (wikipedia). According to another source, of these homes, the 1831 Census registered 49 Jewish resident families (source). (Reconciling these two sources apparently indicates there were on average 12 individuals living in each family home.)

In 1836, in Moinesti, there were 193 Jews, three teachers, and three Hahams. In 1844, in “The Charter of Moinesti town” (Prince Mihail Grigore Sturdza) there are some mentions about “the Jews, the Rabbi, and the Haham”. In the same year, Neculai Neculce sells a piece of ground to Rabbi Manascu from Moinesti…

The 1885 -1893 statistics mention approximately 500 families. There are also mentioned five prayer houses; a ritual bath (mentioned also by M. Sadoveanu: “the only public bath was owned by the Jews…”); a primary school for boys, founded in 1893, with 125 students; a cemetery. 1896 -1899. J.C.A. (Jewish Colonization Association) founded by Baron Rothschild, offers support for erecting a new school. In 1896, there were 183 students. In 1899, there were 2,398 Jews [or] some 50.6% [of] the entire population. (source)

Of the two Jewish cemeteries in the town, somewhere between 1000 and 5000 tombstones (most of which are toppled) attest to a Jewish population that persisted from the early 18th Century until the Holocaust. The earliest tombstone was dated by a visitor to 1740 (fourty years before the town was first chartered, source). Even older stones may be undateable due to erosion by vegetation and the elements.

For such a small place, Moineşti has something of a proud if obscure history, as the birthplace of some wonderful Jewish artists, poets and writers. Here’s a compilation of all the folks I could find associated with Moinesti with Google:

Tristan Tzara, aka Samy Rosenstock, Yiddish and Hebrew poet. He was born in Moinesti, Romania. In 1912, he began to publish poems in a symbolist style, which were to be highly influential in Romanian poetry. In 1916 he moved to Zurich, Switzerland, where he was among the founders of Dadaism, the name of which was derived from Tzara opening a dictionary and choosing the first irrelevant word. Dada was a nihilistic revolutionary movement, aimed at demolishing the values of modern civilization. Tzara was considered the movement’s most articulate exponent, expressed in his Romanian and French poems (he lived in Paris from 1919). As the avant-garde turned to Surrealism, he joined forces with that group and his work became more contained and sober. In 1935 he joined the Communists and during World War II was active in the underground in France.

Binyamin Zeev Ehrenkranz (aka Velvel Zbarazher, 1819-1883), a colourful Yiddish singer/comedian originally from Galicia, settled in Moinesti for a while.

Samuel Grinberg (1879-1959) - the first Rabbi confirmed by F.C.I. Bucharest and by the Ministry of Cults.

Pic G. Adrian (Pincu Grinberg), poet, plastic artist and art critic, settled in Barcelona.

Samuel Grimberg, poet and writer, precursor of the Poalei Tzion movement. [Could this book, "350 Jewish Jokes" by a Samuel Grimberg, (with a ridiculously caricatured illustrated cover) be written by him?]

Charles Davison (b. 1891, in Moinesti): neuropsychiatrist, neuropathologist, and educator; worked for several hospitals in Pittsburgh and taught at Columbia University; contributed more than 100 articles to medical journals.

More Jews from Moinesti can be found on the Moinesti page at the Romania’s Jewish heritage web site. This page includes some brief and casually organized details of the Jews of Moinesti from what looks to be oral histories.

Moineşti was also the birthplace of an important proto-Zionist enterprise. In the late 19th century, Jews from Moineşti and soon after, Bacău, founded the first two Chovevei Zion colonies in Palestine in 1882: Rosh Pinah and Samarin. Overlooking the Mediterranean, today, Samarin is known as Zikhron Ya’aqov (זִכְרוֹן יַעֲקֹב), the home of Carmel Winery. Here is a panorama view of the lands near Rosh Pina taken by resident Itamar Aratiya at the website trekearth.

Zionist enterprises paralleled the influence of the Haskala. In 1910, Moineşti opened it’s first school for both boys and girls learning together. The building also housed the offices and meeting room of the B’nai Brith.

There were also some Hassidim in Moineşti. My great-great grandfathers were quite bearded but there’s no way I can know whether they were Hassidim, but then again maybe they were. It gives me so much pleasure to know that a niggun survives from the daughter of a Breslover Hassid born in Moinesti. The tune appears on the album, A Mazeldiker Yid, by the Klezmer roots band, Di Naye Kapelye.

Tracks 17 and 18: The Bosnian Nign
This melody was learned from the singing of Cili Svarts, the wife of Itsik Svarts, the Yiddish writer, teacher, and former director of the Yiddish theater of Iasi, Romania. A schoolteacher, avid singer, and formidable baker of kosher soda cookies, Cili was born the daughter of a Breslover Hasid in Moinesti, Romania, in 1915. This was her favorite melody. She learned it from her uncle Alter Baris who worked as a forester in the Bosnian town of Zavidovich before the First World War. Whether Sephardic or Ashkenazic in origin, we play it as a slow hora. Sadly, Zavidovich was largely destroyed during the Bosnian War, as was my maternal grandmother’s birthplace, the nearby town of Travnik. We hope this melody serves to honor the memory of Bosnia’s Jewish culture, and as a loving tribute to the memory of Itsik and Cili Svarts.

My great-grandfather, with his parents and children left Mojnescht around 1911 (+/-2 years) for Montreal, Canada. The only thing recalled by one of my grand-uncles was that the town had constant and loud sounds of pounding. What an incredible detail! At the time they left, Moineşti had just begun to be a center for oil exploration in the Carpathian Mountains. Below is an undated photo I found of the oil wells in Moineşti at a Romanian website.

According to one source, the Jews from Moinesti were the owners of the some of the first oil distilleries in Moldova.

Virgil Madgerau: “…the small oil distilleries belonging to the Jews are part of the history of the Romanian oil”…

1860, Wolf Lazarovici built “the first distillery [in] Moineşti”. Iosif Theiller “was the first in the country to obtain a license for exploitation of a oil well with modern equipment” (Solomon Sapira), with “American-style pumps”. He published the study “Idei economice”. “Mister Theiller, who became a Romanian citizen, is the first founder of the gas and paraffin factory in Moinesti…” (”Fraternitatea”, 1882). Moses Frischoff was exporter of oil, automobile oil, etc. (source)

Steaua Romana, a Romanian oil company had “access to extensive oil deposits in the Eastern and Southern Carpathian Mountains” (source). These deposits were acquired in 1903 when Deutsche Bank purchased Steaua Romana. By the onset of WWI in 1914. Steaua Romana had become “the largest and most important production plant in Romania” (ibid). To the right, is an undated drawing of the Steaua Romana’s oil field at Moineşti (probably circa 1910).

Moinesti’s history in oil extraction is preserved iconographically in the City of Moinesti’s seal.

Monesti Jews were also active in the local timber industry.

No details are remembered why my family left but perhaps they simply became terribly saddened as the small town atmosphere of Moineşti in the midst of the Carpathian Mountain forests was transformed into a hellish and polluted industrial extraction point for oil. That, combined with the precarious position of Jews in Moldova, probably convinced them to leave, as many, many other Romanian Jews had in the preceding years. (40,000 Romanian Jews left for America between 1880 and 1910). Social conditions in the region had been deteriorating on the national level. For my family, the critical event preceding their departure may well have been the Kishinev Pogrom in 1905, the first state-inspired action against Jews in the 20th century (source).

Widespread impoverishment and pogroms during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to large-scale emigration. The most notorious pogrom occurred in 1903, apparently with the support of the Russian Ministry of the Interior, led by Vyacheslav von Plehve. The attack occurred on Easter, April 6 and 7, spurred by a blood libel campaign in a prominent newspaper. According to official statistics, 49 Jews were killed and another 500 were injured. Material losses from property destruction and looting were enormous. About 2,000 Jews were left homeless. Another pogrom occurred on August 19, 1905, in which 19 Jews were killed and 56 were injured.

Of course, other parts of my family remained, most of whom were lost in the Holocaust. According to a cousin, a few survived and their descendants are living in Israel. Above is a memorial at Yad Vashem in Isreal inscribed in Hebrew and English with the names of Bacau and Moinesti.
An exhibit on the Jews of Romania can be found here. Below is an undated image of “Moineşti: Primãria si Judecãtoria” I found on a Romanian site. (I’m not certain, but I think judecatoria means, courthouse.) Perhaps one of my ancestral relatives is posing in this…

14 kinds of people

1. those mistaken for bigfoot
2. those who are asleep
3. government workers
4. nameless ones
5. those who exist only in dreams
6. women with cats
7. seafaring ones
8. those who are crying that cannot be consoled
9. actors
10. dead ancestors
11. babies
12. others
13. cyborgs, or drivers of cars
14. those that are already driven to madness

IMPORTANT NOTE: This d’var is somewhat unapologetically anachronistic, by which I mean, I’m taking the myth and context of multiple traditions and using them to understand the meaning of related myths in another early or later tradition. In doing so, this d’var is creative and while not totally devoid of insight, should not be taken as a surrogate for a sophisticated academic reading of the sources. With this fair warning, onwards into Torah.

From Midrash Konen, 25:

“God found the Upper Waters and the female Lower Waters locked in a passionate embrace. ‘Let one of you rise,” He ordered, ‘and the other fall!’ But they rose up together, whereupon God asked: ‘Why did you both rise?’ ‘We are inseparable,’ they answered with one voice. ‘Leave us to our love!’ God now stretched His little finger and tore them apart; the upper He lifted high, the Lower He cast down. To punish their defiance, God would have singed them with fire, had they not sued for mercy. He pardoned them on two conditions: that, at the Exodus, they would allow the Children of Israel to pass though dry-shod; and that they would prevent Yonah from fleeing by ship to Tarshish.” (Hebrew Myths, Graves and Patai, p.40).

In the Sumerian cosmology, in the beginning, everything was water, pure undelineated water. In B’reishit, there was Tohu and Bohu (often translated as waste or chaos and void, respectively. I prefer depth and expanse.  The two were so inextricably bound that nothing else could exist. And yet something did. And that thing was Spreading Out, reaching, filling, moving, creating whatever was necessary for further infinite expressions. In a word, something Emergent. What was God’s spirit doing hovering over the abyss? I believe I have an idea, that will be made clear later in this d’var.

Raphael Patai cites Hermann Gunkel’s explanation in Schopfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (1895) that Tiamat is an early cognate of the biblical Hebrew words, T’hom and Tohu. The important premise is thus that the creatures alternately known as Tiamat, Leviathan, Rachab, and Behemoth are mythic incarnations and equivalents of important aspects of the cosmos, central to the worldview of our ancestors (and which is now almost entirely forgotten…) — the Lower Waters and the Upper Waters.  (By the end of the d’var we hope that the relationship between the two will seem clear and obvious. And the ramifications for understanding apocryphal events such as the flood and cosmic reconciliations such as the Age of the Messiah, will be made clearer (from a mythic perspective).

“Depth”, Tohu, is referred to as Tehom — the abyss, its destiny within a few verses is to become the Lower Waters. Expanse is called, Bohu becomes the Upper Waters. Alternately, depending on the midrash or the myth, the two, Tohu and Bohu were allies or lovers. Whichever, the important lesson, the iqar, is that Tohu and Bohu were so closely linked that creation was impossible unless they could be divided.

Tehom, in midrash is described as the sweet Underground Waters, the Lower Waters forbidden to rise and unite again with the Upper Waters. In Sumerian myth, Enki/Ea, god of Wisdom, emerges out of the sweet water abyss, called the Abzu. (The “begetter” ur-god in the sumerian pantheon, is Apsu the beloved of Tiamat. Apsu is killed by Ea.) Graves and Pattai, speculate that for doctrinal reasons, these details are washed over in B’resihit and the abstract concepts of Tehom, Tohu and Bohu, stand in for what in these other myths are cosmogonic battles of creation.

And yet Tohu and Bohu do reappear in a less abstract form, if not as gods, then as cosmically huge monstrous creatures: Bohu as Behemoth and Tohu/Tehom as Tiamat, a great serpent also referred to alternately as Leviathan, Rachab. (Graves and Pattai add other biblical serpents: the Tanin, Aharon’s serpent/rod, and the Nachash, the tempting snake in Eden, to the list). Tiamat may be the only mythic creature/character from Mesopotamian myth to be referred to with the same name in the Tanakh. In the Enuma Elish, however, Tiamat is not only seen as a great serpent. She is Mother Tiamat, the primordial God Tiamat, who allied by incestuous marriage with her son Kingu must be defeated by Marduk. After Tiamat’s defeat, her body forms the material for the earth’s crust and the planets).

Although the sages were confused whether the female Leviathan and male Behemoth were creatures with male Leviathan and female Behemoth consorts (like the other animals), other legends maintained that the Leviathan and Behemoth were each others mates (despite the differences in their monstrous anatomies).

“Yet others hold that Leviathan was to have been Behemoth’s mate; but that God parted them, keeping Behemoth on dry land and sending Leviathan into the sea, lest their combined wight crack Earth’s arches.” (4 Ezra vi. 47-52; Enoch I.X. 7-8)

The sages imagined the Leviathan to be a great sea serpent or crocodile, the largest of the sea creatures, but strange older legends left a legacy of contradictions. When the Leviathan moved, the earth shuddered in earthquakes. This reflected the ancient idea that the Leviathan is in the bedrock, in the farthest depths — the abyss. The Behemoth is imagined to be the largest of the land animals, a giant hippopotamus intriguingly called the “Ox of the Pit’, dwelling in the land of the Thousand Mountains beyond the river Sabbatyon.

Being incarnations of the Upper and Lower Waters. Both the Behemoth and the Leviathan drink pure water, both relying on fresh water — attesting to their primordial roots in a universe created out of pure fresh water.

“…[Leviathan] drinks from a tributary of the Jordan, as it flows into the ocean through a secret channel.” (many sources to cite, see Hebrew Myths, Graves and Patai, p.50)

“Summer heat makes him [Behemoth] so thirsty that all the waters flowing down the Jordan in six months, or even a year, barely suffice for a single gulp. He therefore drinks at a huge river issuing from Eden, Jubal by name.” (Mid. Konen, 26; Pesiqta Rabbatai, 80b-81a; Lev. Rab 13.3; 22.10; Num. Rab 21.18; PRE, ch. 11)

The importance of this ancient symbolism, although arcane, is still entirely relevant as they represent the powerful relationships with nature and natural cycles that were (and remain still) at the core of our tradition and worldview. Consider the lost holiday, of the Simchat Beit haShoeva, the most festive day in the whole calendar when water was pured over a rock in an underground chamber on the temple mount. It was the most festive day in the whole Jewish calendar! A full explanation of why would require delving into the meaning of the Even ha-Shetiyah… the foundation stone (even ma’su hobim hayta l’rosh hapina). But the following aggadoth/midrashim provide some context:

“God also forbade Tehom, the sweet Underground Waters, to rise up — except little by little and enforced obedience by placing a sherd [the even ha-shetiya] above her, on which He had engraved His Ineffable Name. This seal was removed only once only; when mankind sinned in Noach’s day. Therupon Tehom united with the Upper Waters [!] and together they flooded the earth.” (Yer. sanh. 29a bot.; Mid Shemuel, ch. 26; Yalqut Reubeni i:4 f.; ii: 109; cf. Enoch LIX. 7-10; PRE, ch. 23; all based on Gen VII. 11.)

“Since then, Tehom has always crouched submissively in her deep abode like a huge beast, sending up springs to those who deserve them, and nourishing the tree roots. Though she thus influences man’s fate, none may visit her recesses.” (Genesis xlix. 25; ezekiel xxxi. 4; xxvi. 19; xxxi. 15; job xxxviii 16)

“Tehom delivers three times more water to Earth than the rain [the Upper Waters]. At the Feast of Tabernacles [Sukkot/Simchat Beit hs-shoeva], Temple priests pour libations of wine and water on God’s altar. Then Ridya, an angel shaped like a three year heifer with cleft lips, commands Tehom: ‘Let your springs rise!’, and commands the Upper Waters: ‘Let rain fall!’” (Gen. Rab. 122, 294; B. Taanit 25b)

…Think of our Upper Water prayer begun in this same period and recalling this event: “mashiv haruch umorid hagashem” (may the winds flow and the rains fall) — a prayer prior to the rainy season to help ensure the refreshing of the land over the Winter. However, unlike our prayer today, the temple prayers were delivered with a more cosmic worldview. These libations were being made at the central portal to the Lower Waters, the stone cap above which was the single most precious object in the universe — that which separated the upper and lower waters — the first thing ever created! And the equivalence between Leviathan and the primeval Lower Waters is further betrayed by the mysterious agaddoth that when the Leviathan moves, earthquakes are generated.

“When hungry, [Leviathan] puffs out a smoky vapour which troubles an immense extent of waters; when thirsty, [Leviathan] causes such an upheval that seventy years must elapse before calm returns to the Deep, and even Behemoth on the Thousand Mountains shows signs of terror.”

The Leviathan generates earthquakes when it moves because the Leviathan resides just below the navel of the world.

“Some say that a gem bearing the Messiah’s name — which floated with the wind until the Altar of Sacrifice had been built on Mount Zion, and then came to rest there — was the first solid thing God created. Others, that it was the Foundation Rock [Even Shtiyah] supporting his altar; and that when God restrained Tehom’s waters, He engraved His forty-two-letter Name on its face, rather than on a shard. Still others say that He cast the Rock into deep water and built land around, much as a child before birth grows from the navel outward; it remains the world’s navel to this day”.

That we have this tradition of omphalos, the navel of the world, connects us to a host of other people with similar origin myths. Currently, I am trying to understand the omphalos as it connects to the idea of tzimtzum. I’ve spoken earlier with friends how I think per Rav Aryeh Kaplan that the cosmogony of tzimtzum is a cosmic analogy of contractions in a womb, the “thread” of the tzimtzum being an umbilical cord, and that it is not necessary to think of it in terms of fertilization. The even ha’shetiyah would then be an early image of what in the Lurianic period would become the vessels and the klippot shards. Just as the even ha’shettiyah protects the world from being overwhelmed by the waters below, the vessels were supposed to protect creation from being overwhelmed by the primal creative light passing through the thread. Common to both traditions are shards, but in one there is water, and in the other, energy. I have to think about this more — and with your help. Because I don’t believe this idea has been published anywhere and it is so central to the central cosmologies of our people, ancient and now modern (even if by modern, I’m referring to kabbalah and chassidut).

So what was God doing hovering above the abyss? I strongly suspect that the midrashim are pointing to an ancient lost legend that the spirit of god hovering over the abyss was the creation of the Even ha’shetiyah, the foundation stone.

But back to the future,

At the dawn of the Age of the Messiah, the sages imagine the Leviathan and the Behemoth will be slaughtered, providing delicacies for the righteous, their skins providing covering over their tents of celebration.

“While those who sit in its shade will be judged righteous, and in it will be banded together, to protect them from evil, to nourish them, in the succah of curtains [made of Leviathan's skin] to eat, to carry them [from exile] to good pasture [in Eretz Yisrael], to pay it’s reward…” (from Ba’al T’hi, Shacharit service, chazzan’s repetition of the Amidah, second day of Sukkot, p. 296-7, machzor zichron shmuel, artscroll).

In reviving these symbols per their ancient meaning, I would propose an alternate suggestion for the fate of the Leviathan and the Behemoth in the Age of the Messiah. Just as the Upper and Lower Waters were brought together in the time of Noach, so they are brought together again, however, it is we who have changed. In the Messianic Age, we breath water and the flood is not destructive — it is a creative force, just as we have analogized Water to be Torah. (Alternately, in the Messianic Age, we join with the waters above, i.e. the Moon, possibly populating the moon with waters from earth. Is the heavenly Jerusalem on the Moon?)

Should the Israelites, now the Jews, be more correctly knows as people of the moon, the moon representing the primeval pure waters, the purifying waters that are always replenished, symbolizing in the waxing and waning cycles of fertility, and of the earth’s fertility? How the calfs and the red heifers relate to water purification and moon symbolism, I’m not certain, but Raphael and Pattai think there’s a connection, and the description of the angel Ridya I think suggests something too. I’m wondering whether these sacrifice/offerings are rehearsing the origin myth of the separation of the waters, which in other myths was the slaughter of Apsi/Bohu/Behemoth. In the Sumerian tradition, man is formed from the blood of Apsu. If Apsu represents Upper Waters and Adam (a-dam) is formed of the blood of the Upper Waters could then some purification be made by returning Man to his upper water source? Or slaughtering an animal representing the Upper Waters in the place of Man? I’m not sure, but it’s something I have to think about more with your help.

Credits for most of the sources used above are referenced out of Robert Graves and Raphael Patai’s Hebrew Myths: The Book of Genesis (McGraw Hill: New York, 1964)

Behemoth and Leviathan (1825, reprinted 1874) by William Blake, an engraved illustration that appears in Blake’s The Book of Job.

Pointed to, as in, go in this direction and you will find. This applies to an individual as well as to a society. The idea, the iqar, is that if you participate in certain actions, the consequence of them will be a Truth. So what do I mena by Truth?

Truth is something that cannot be revealed explicitly, because it must emerge on its own. To reveal it is thus a lie. It must be a consequence and is entirely hidden by the curtain, the parochet, of time and preparation.

So what then, can be taught? Actions and ideas that add up to a revelation, the catalyst of which is kindness and intelligence.

Actions must not stand on their own. They must be beautiful by themselves and as reflections of a beautiful worldview that treasures kindness and intelligence. Actions are preparations.