02 - Communal Institutions

In 1719 a hakham bashi, Bezalel Cohen, was first appointed for Walachia and Moldavia by the suzerain, the sultan. He resided in Jassy and he had a representative for Walachia in Bucharest. The hakham bashi's function was hereditary and included the right of collecting taxes on religious ceremonies and contributions from every head of a family—comprising 30,000 taxpayers altogether in the two principalities in 1803—as well as conferring exemption from taxes and tolls. Yet his prestige was slight, and learned rabbis were considered by the Jews as their real spiritual leaders. The growing Russian and Galician element in the Rumanian Jewish population at the beginning of the 19th century opposed the hakham bashi, since such an institution was unknown to them and many of them were followers of Hasidism and led by zaddikim. As they were foreign subjects they asked their consuls to intercede, and in 1819 the prince of Moldavia decided that the hakham bashi should have jurisdiction only over "native" Jews. Because of permanent strife among the diverse groups of Jews and their complaints to the authorities, the latter decided in 1834 on the abolition of the hakham bashi system. Under this system there was also a Jews' Guild, one of 32 guilds set up according to nationality (Armenians, Greeks, etc.) or profession, which took care of tax collection proportionately to the number of persons organized in it. For the Jews the guild was really the legal body of the community. The collective tax was paid from the tax on kasher meat, the expenses of the institutions (talmud torah, hekdesh, cemetery) being covered by the remainder.

The center of the guild was in Jassy and its head was named staroste ("senior"; Heb. rosh medinah). In Bucharest this function was carried out by the representative of the hakham bashi. When the hakham bashi system was abolished (1834), the Jews' Guild disappeared as well; the result was the disintegration of the Jewish communities. The collective tax, formerly fixed by the guild, was now imposed by the government. The functions of the community devolved on the various prayer houses and the artisans' guilds and sometimes on the hevra kaddisha or the Jewish hospital (in Jassy).

Source:
[N.Kr.]
www.heritagefilms.com

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* History: Romania