Jewish History Museum Bucharest

Jewish History Museum, Bucharest - darkometer rating : 5 - A synagogue-turned-museum in central Bucharest . Only a few parts of its contents are actually dark, but the whole museum is quite endearing. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: the building used to be the Tailors' Synagogue, and in 1978 it first opened its doors as the Jewish History Museum (or "History Museum of the Romanian Jews", to give it its official full title). It was very much the work of Chief-Rabbi Moses Rosen (1912-1994), whose mission it was to fight against the total disappearance of the Jewish legacy in Romania . At the time the Jewish community was not only dwindling, the Jewish identity of those still around was at risk of being forgotten. It certainly wasn't encouraged under communism. So Rosen's initiative can also be seen as resistance against the Ceausescu regime, in its own special way. It's also a miracle that even the building survived, given its location: right in the historic centre of the city in a neighbourhood that was almost completely levelled when Ceausescu realized his crazily megalomaniacal "rebuilding" of central Bucharest . The synagogue is only a stone's throw away from what became B-dul Unirii, the central boulevard of this brutalist architectural project. Yet survive it did, and today the meanwhile revamped museum provides a rare insight into Romanian Jewish history. What there is to see: first of all, the building itself is worth seeing, and the painted ceiling is particularly impressive. The museum's collection consists largely of documentation of the Jewish presence in Romania and the contribution Jews made to the arts, to science and to Romanian society.