Czernowitz. Hebrew Temple.
Czernowitz (now Chernovtsi in Ukraine) is located in the northeastern Bukovina, which belonged to the Ottoman province of Moldova until it was ceded to the Habsburgs in 1775. In 1919, the city fell to the Romanians, who called it Cernăuți, before becoming a Ukrainian city in 1945. In 1854, Lazar Elias Igel (1825–1892)—a native of Lemberg (Lviv) and moderate modernizer who studied for the rabbinate and earned a doctorate in Jewish theology under Samuel David Luzzatto (1800–1865) in Padua and taught Oriental Studies at the university in Lemberg—was appointed as Chief Rabbi. The city’s traditionalist rabbi, Isaac Horowitz-Meisels, impeded Igel’s efforts as best he could. When he left in 1870 while Igel’s tenure was extended, the traditionalists seceded, and from 1872 to 1875, two separate Jewish communities existed. A tenuous compromise left Igel in his post, working alongside a second rabbi acceptable to the traditionalists, Benjamin Weiss (1841–1912).
The emphatically neo-Moorish Israelite Temple was inaugurated on Erev Rosh Hashanah 1877. Badly damaged by the Germans, its remnants proved indestructible and were turned into a cinema (now Chernivtsi Cinema).
Published by Gee Haa, 1928. Posted on 19 April 1929.
Postcard from the book: Jews in Old Postcards and Prints