Today we dedicated the day to seeing the Jewish sites in Bucharest.  We first started off the day with a nice breakfast at the hotel, a mostly continental breakfast with various cold cuts of meat and cheese a long with pastries.  We met up with Eduard, our tour guide at 10am and went to our first synagogue with doubled as a museum of Jewish people in Romania.  Eduard has a relationship with the rabbis or the people who run these sites so we were able to get access to these sites that isn’t normally available to the public, which was very nice.  This particular synagogue was of Polish origin and was designed in a Moorish style.  We went to another synagogue afterwards but did not go inside as it was currently under renovation.  We instead went to the adjacent offices which houses records of Jewish people who lived in Bucharest to ask about records relating to our relatives.

We found information regarding the whereabouts of Soloman Lobel, Joesph’s father in a nearby cemetery Filentropia.  We went to the cemetery and found the grave site hidden away in overgrown bushes.  We had paid someone to clear the brush so we could verify it and take a few pictures.  It was indeed Soloman Lobel – however I couldn’t be absolutely sure if it is the one which I am related to – however it seems to make sense.  The death date seems to match and the age of him seems to relate to other information I have gathered on him.  Interestingly Filentropia was the cemetery of elites in the city, so anyone buried here had some money or was very well known in the community.  From what I’ve been told Solomon owned a tavern or bar in the city so it would make sense he would be buried at this cemetery.

After the cemetery we visited one of the longest running Yiddish Theaters in the word then we visited Bucharest’s orthodox synagogue and a local Jewish community center.  We finished the day with a meal at a Italian restaurant called Il Calcio located by the concert hall.