Buhusi

BUHUSI

BUHUSI (Rom. Buhuşi), town in Moldavia, E. Romania. Jews settled there haround 1823, when the lord of the land of Buhusi, which was then a village, decided to set up a town on its grounds; they numbered 82 in 1831. Buhusi became an important center of Ḥasidism in Moldavia when the ẓaddik Isaac Friedman (1835–1896), the grandson of Rabbi Israel of *Ruzhin, many of whose followers being Bessarabian and Moldavian Jews, made his home there. The community increased from 537 in 1859 to 1,728 in 1899. Welfare associations and educational institutions included a talmud torah and a Jewish-Romanian elementary school, founded in 1897. A yeshivah, founded in 1908 adjacent to the "court" of the ẓaddik, existed until 1916. In 1930 there were in Buhusi 1,972 Jews (22.6% of the total population), occupied in commerce and crafts. Beginning in 1940, their situation deteriorated. In 1940, 20 Jews, among the leaders of the community, were arrested and taken hostage. In June 1941 a project was planned to deport all Jewish men between the ages of 16 and 60 to the Targu-Jiu concentration camp, but was not carried out. Jews from the villages of Rediu, Roznov, Tazlau, Candesti, and Borlesti and from the town of Targu-Neamt were forcibly transferred to Buhusi. The community had to help them, together with other pauperized Buhusi Jews.

After the war the Jewish population rose to about 8,000 as some of the people driven out of the nearby villages chose to resettle in Buhusi. Most of these emigrated and by 1969 the town had 50 Jewish families and one synagogue. In 2004, there were no Jews left in Buhusi, but the synagogue of the ẓaddik remained and members of the ḥasidic community of Buhusi ("Bohosh"), organized in Bene Berak, Israel, made a pilgrimage there once a year.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

J. Kaufman, Cronica communitatilor Israelite din Judetul Neamtu, II (1929), 383–84; PK Romanyah, I, 21–24; M. Carp, Cartea Neagra, 1 (1946), 136–38. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: L.Z. Herscovici, in: Minimum (Dec. 1988); idem, in: Toledot ha-Yehudim be-Romanyah, 2 (2001), 197–203; S. Leibovici-Lais, Intre legenda si realitate (1995), 229–39; M.S. Salomon, in: Koveẓ Be'er Yiẓḥak, 1 (1992), 28–33.