Romania · Republic of Moldova
"Deep into the landscapes of Eastern European Jewish memory — from Iași through the shtetlach of Bukovina and Moldavia, to Chișinău and the former Bessarabia."
This tour journeys through what was once one of the densest concentrations of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. From Iași, the former capital of Moldavia with its 1671 Great Synagogue, through the Hasidic heartlands of Bukovina with their UNESCO-listed painted monasteries, the shtetl towns of Dorohoi, Siret, and Botoșani, and across the border into the Republic of Moldova and Chișinău — the site of the infamous 1903 pogrom and still home to a living Jewish community. Every day brings a different layer of this rich, complex, and often tragic history.
Tour Highlights
Day by Day
Day 1 — Thursday, 16. September 2027
Guests arrive individually in Iași over the course of the day and transfer to the hotel at their leisure. In the late afternoon, the group gathers for an introductory meeting, where the tour leader outlines the days ahead — from the former capital of Moldavia, through the Jewish shtetlach of Bukovina and Moldavia, to Chișinău and the former Bessarabia.
The evening continues with a welcome dinner, the first opportunity for the group to get acquainted over Moldavian specialties and local wine, and a fitting start to a journey through what was once one of the densest concentrations of Jewish life in Eastern Europe.
Day 2 — Friday, 17. September 2027
The day is devoted entirely to Jewish Iași. We begin at the Great Synagogue (Sinagoga Mare), completed in 1671 and the oldest surviving synagogue in Romania — a remarkable Baroque structure built partly below street level so as not to outshine the nearby cathedral, a clever workaround of centuries-old restrictions on synagogue height. Beautifully restored, with its carved and painted wooden ark, the synagogue still hosts services on major holidays and stands at the heart of what was once the Târgu Cucu Jewish quarter, home to eight neighboring synagogues before the Second World War.
Just outside stands the memorial to the victims of the 1941 pogrom, a sober and necessary stop before continuing to the Pogrom Museum, and to sites connected with the golden age of Yiddish culture in the city, including the location associated with Goldfaden's founding productions. Along the way we discuss the guilds, rabbis, printing houses and everyday life of a community that shaped Iași as profoundly as it shaped Jewish Eastern Europe.
The afternoon leaves room to reflect on the day over coffee in the old town before dinner together.
Iași was, for more than three centuries, the beating heart of Jewish Moldavia. Jews received guaranteed rights of residence here as early as 1622, settled in their own quarter around Târgu Cucu, and built up a community that by the early twentieth century numbered some 40,000–45,000 people — roughly half the city's population — with over 100 synagogues and prayer houses. Iași was a major center of rabbinic learning, and it holds a unique place in world culture: it was here, in 1876, that Avram Goldfaden staged the first professional Yiddish theatre performance, giving Iași a fair claim to being the birthplace of modern Yiddish theatre. The community's history also carries deep trauma: the Iași pogrom of June 1941, one of the most murderous episodes of the Holocaust in Romania, killed thousands of the city's Jews within a few days. Today only a small community remains, but it maintains two active synagogues and the memory of what was once a great center of Jewish civilization.
Day 3 — Saturday, 18. September 2027
Saturday is Shabbat, and the day is structured accordingly: a walking tour only, on foot, through the historic core of Iași in the morning, with the afternoon left free.
The morning walk takes in the city's grand non-Jewish landmarks that grew up alongside — and often literally beside — the Jewish quarter: the extraordinary stone-lace facade of the Trei Ierarhi (Three Hierarchs) Church, the monumental neo-Gothic Palace of Culture, the fortified Golia Monastery with its leaning tower, and the elegant boulevards of the old princely capital, once the political and cultural center of Moldavia under rulers such as Vasile Lupu and later the Cuza-era capital of the newly united Romania. We pass the National Theatre, itself a reminder of Iași's role as a cradle of Romanian — and Yiddish — stagecraft, and finish near Union Square and the elegant streets of the historic center.
The afternoon is at leisure — time to rest, to revisit a site at one's own pace, to browse the old town's cafés and bookshops, or simply to enjoy a quiet Shabbat afternoon before the group heads out into the countryside the following morning.
Day 4 — Sunday, 19. September 2027
Leaving Iași, we travel south and west into the hill country of Moldavia, stopping in the small town of Buhuși.
We visit the synagogue and the site of the rebbe's court before continuing through the scenic Bistrița river valley toward Piatra Neamț, arriving in the late afternoon with time to settle in before dinner.
A modest town today, Buhuși was once a significant center of Hasidism in Moldavia. In the mid-nineteenth century, Rabbi Yitzchok Friedman — grandson of the great Rebbe Israel of Ruzhin — settled here and founded the Bohush Hasidic court, one of the "royal" Ruzhiner branches (alongside Sadigura, Boyan, Chortkov and others). Buhuși's Jewish population grew from a few dozen families in the 1820s to nearly 2,000 by 1930, drawing Hasidim from across Moldavia and Bessarabia to the rebbe's court. The dynasty relocated to Israel in 1951 and continues there today, but the synagogue associated with the tzaddik still stands in Buhuși, and Bohush Hasidim still make an annual pilgrimage back to the town of their court's origin.
Day 5 — Monday, 20. September 2027
We begin the morning with the Wooden "Baal Shem Tov" Synagogue and the neighboring Great Synagogue, before visiting Piatra Neamț's old Jewish cemetery, with graves dating to the 1600s. Time permitting, we also take in the town's non-Jewish landmarks — the medieval Princely Court Tower built under Stephen the Great, and the view over the town from the Cozla or Pietricica hills, with the Ceahlău massif on the horizon.
We then continue to Târgu Neamț, stopping to visit Neamț Monastery, one of the oldest and most important monastic foundations in Moldavia, and, nearby, the ruins of Neamț Fortress, built by Stephen the Great to guard the western approach to his realm — a striking counterpoint of Orthodox monastic and princely military heritage to the Jewish sites of the preceding days. From here we cross into Bukovina and arrive in Rădăuți for the evening.
A trading town at the foot of the Carpathians since the Middle Ages, Piatra Neamț had one of Moldavia's oldest and most storied Jewish communities, with tombstones surviving from the early seventeenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, Jews made up roughly half the town's population. Local legend closely ties the community to the Baal Shem Tov himself, founder of Hasidism, who is said to have withdrawn to nearby Mount Ceahlău and prayed here on Shabbat — a story impossible to verify but deeply woven into the town's identity. Piatra Neamț is home to Romania's only surviving wooden synagogue, built in 1766, alongside the nineteenth-century Great Synagogue. The community, once numbering nearly 8,000, survived the Holocaust largely intact but was reduced by emigration to only a handful of families today.
Day 6 — Tuesday, 21. September 2027
Today is devoted to the celebrated painted monasteries of southern Bukovina, a UNESCO World Heritage circuit, interwoven with the region's Jewish heritage. We drive first to Sucevița Monastery, the largest and most fortress-like of the painted monasteries, its exterior walls covered in vivid frescoes including the famous "Ladder of Virtue."
We then continue to Câmpulung Moldovenesc, once home to a Jewish community of several thousand and to three synagogues (one still standing and in occasional use), with a well-documented cemetery on the town's outskirts — a classic Bukovina mountain shtetl.
From there we reach Gura Humorului, another former Jewish market town in the foothills, where we also visit Voroneț Monastery, renowned for the deep "Voroneț blue" of its frescoes and its monumental exterior "Last Judgment." We return to Rădăuți for the evening.
Rădăuți grew from a handful of families in the early 1800s into one of Bukovina's largest Jewish communities, numbering over 6,000 on the eve of the Holocaust — roughly a third of the town's population, with eight prayer-houses alongside its central synagogue. Nearly all of Rădăuți's Jews were deported to Transnistria in October 1941; only a fraction survived to return. The town's twin-towered synagogue, inaugurated in 1883, still stands as a local landmark, and its sprawling Jewish cemetery — one of the most extensively documented in Romania, thanks to years of work by descendants of the community — remains a place of pilgrimage for families researching their roots in Bukovina.
Day 7 — Wednesday, 22. September 2027
We depart Rădăuți for Siret, a former medieval capital of Moldavia on the present-day border with Ukraine, home to one of the oldest surviving Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe, with gravestones dating to the sixteenth century and extraordinarily rich stone-carving from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — a site of real significance for anyone tracing Bukovinian Jewish roots, since Siret's cemetery served surrounding communities, including Rădăuți itself, before they established burial grounds of their own.
We then continue south to Dorohoi.
We visit the surviving synagogue and the Jewish cemetery, site of the 1940 massacre, before continuing on to Suceava, our base for the next two nights.
Before the Second World War, Dorohoi's roughly 5,800 Jews made up more than a third of the town's population, supporting 21 synagogues and a rich communal, cultural and Zionist life; the town produced writers of note, among them Ion Călugăru and Sașa Pană. Dorohoi's history, however, is marked by one of the earliest anti-Jewish massacres of wartime Romania: on 1 July 1940, following the retreat of Romanian forces from Bessarabia, soldiers carried out a pogrom in the town and its Jewish cemetery, killing, by community accounts, up to 200 people — months before Romania entered the war or allied itself with Germany. It remains one of the lesser-known but earliest chapters of the Holocaust in Romania.
Day 8 — Thursday, 23. September 2027
The morning is spent in Suceava itself: the Gah Synagogue, and the town's Old Jewish Cemetery, dating to the sixteenth-to-seventeenth century and among the oldest in eastern Romania, with elaborately carved tombstones — a genuine open-air museum of Bukovinian Jewish stone-carving. We balance this with Suceava's great non-Jewish landmark, the Suceava Fortress (Cetatea de Scaun), seat of the medieval princes of Moldavia and one of the region's most important medieval strongholds.
In the afternoon we take an excursion to Botoșani.
We visit the Great Synagogue and the town's large Jewish cemetery, and, as a counterpoint, the birthplace and memorial house of Romania's national poet, Mihai Eminescu, at nearby Ipotești — Botoșani's other, very different, claim to fame. We return to Suceava for the evening.
One of the oldest sites of Jewish settlement in the region, dating to the early sixteenth century, Suceava's Jewish population grew to some 8,000 by the outbreak of the First World War, supporting around 18 synagogues and prayer rooms. Only one, the Gah Synagogue (built 1870), survives and remains in use, its interior richly decorated with depictions of the Twelve Tribes of Israel and views of Jerusalem. Suceava's community was also historically important as an administrative center: for much of the eighteenth century it held jurisdiction over the smaller Jewish communities of Siret and Câmpulung.
Jews settled in Botoșani from the seventeenth century, and by the nineteenth the town held one of Moldavia's largest communities — around 11,000 people, roughly 70 synagogues, and a Jewish majority among local merchants and craftsmen. Only the Great Synagogue ("Hoihe Șil"), built in 1834, survives today, remarkable for its intact painted ceiling depicting Jerusalem, the zodiac, and symbols of the Twelve Tribes — one of the finest such interiors left in Romania.
Day 9 — Friday, 24. September 2027
We leave Bukovina and travel south toward the Moldovan border, stopping in Hârlău.
After visiting the synagogue, we cross the border into the Republic of Moldova and continue to Chișinău, arriving in the evening in time for a Shabbat dinner together.
A small but long-established community, documented from 1742, Hârlău once supported five synagogues, a school built with the help of the Jewish Colonization Association, a mikveh and two cemeteries; many local Jews followed the Hasidic rebbe of nearby Pașcani. Only the Great Synagogue, dating from the early nineteenth century, survives, its walls and ceiling covered in vivid folk-Baroque paintings from the 1920s depicting Jerusalem, the Tabernacle, and scenes from the Psalms — one of the loveliest painted synagogue interiors remaining in Moldavia.
Day 10 — Saturday, 25. September 2027
We balance the day with central Chișinău's other landmarks — Stephen the Great Central Park, the Triumphal Arch, and the Nativity Cathedral — before an evening free to explore the city's restaurant scene.
Once known as Kishinev, the city was, before the Second World War, home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the Russian Empire and later Greater Romania — over 50,000 people, some 70 synagogues, and a thriving Yiddish-speaking culture at the heart of the former Pale of Settlement. Chișinău's name, however, is inseparable from tragedy: the 1903 pogrom, in which around 49 Jews were murdered and hundreds injured over Easter, shocked world opinion and became a defining moment in modern Jewish history, leading to a big wave of emigration; a second pogrom followed in 1905. The community was later devastated again during the Holocaust and suppressed under decades of Soviet rule, when nearly all synagogues were closed. Today a much smaller but active Jewish community remains, centered on the sole surviving synagogue and supported by a revival of communal and religious life since Moldova's independence.
Day 11 — Sunday, 26. September 2027
After breakfast, we embark on a touring day through Jewish Chișinău: the streets of the former Jewish quarter around the old market; and the city's one surviving synagogue, today the seat of the local Jewish community and its cultural life. Further we visit the old Jewish cemetery, with its memorial to the victims of the 1903 and 1905 pogroms and the grave of Rabbi Yehuda Leib Tsirelson, chief rabbi of Bessarabia for decades.
In the evening we gather for our farewell dinner.
A second day based in Chișinău, with time for an excursion into the surrounding countryside — options include the extraordinary cave monastery complex of Orheiul Vechi, carved into limestone cliffs above the Răut river, or a visit to one of Moldova's famous underground wine cellars. The afternoon and evening are left flexible, with time for last impressions of the city, personal research follow-ups, or simply rest, ahead of a farewell dinner together in the evening.
Day 12 — Monday, 27. September 2027
Transfers to the airport according to individual flight schedules, bringing the tour to a close.
What's Included
Led throughout by Alex, with local expert guides, historians, and community representatives at key sites.
A detailed briefing pack and reading list sent ahead of departure to prepare you for the journey.
Carefully chosen hotels that reflect the character and history of each city and town.
Comfortable private vehicle throughout, including all cross-border transfers.
Every synagogue, museum, memorial, monastery, and cemetery admission included.
Breakfast each morning, selected dinners and lunches.
2027 Departures
This tour runs once a year, in early autumn. Group size is strictly limited to sixteen participants.
Enquire About This TourUS $500 deposit — fully refundable until 120 days before departure (less $50 fee). See Booking & Cancellation Terms.