BUCHAREST, Romania -- Just a few minutes on foot from the bustle of downtown Bucharest, the State Jewish Theater, down a small side street in the Romanian capital, cuts a forlorn figure.
Yet the theater is one of the few vestiges of what was once a large Jewish community in Romania, and one of the few professional Yiddish-language theaters left in Europe.
In 2014, heavy snowfall literally brought the roof down, causing the theater to close for two years. It reopened to the public in November, its roof fixed, its interior freshly painted and the decades-old wiring finally replaced.
"The last two years it was difficult to survive," said Maia Morgenstern, the theater's manager and an actress who played Mary in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. "We performed here and there. Other theaters, public libraries."
In early January, the theater staged Warsaw: Tourist Guide, a tragicomedy set in the period after World War II, when Jewish families returned to Poland to try to reclaim their property. Despite thick snow blanketing the city, there was a full house.
The first Jewish theater in Romania was founded in the 1870s in the eastern city of Iasi. The current theater in Bucharest was established in 1940 and remained open throughout the war even as Romania was in the grip of anti-Semitism and many Romanian Jews were sent to labor camps. Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany until it switched sides in 1944.
During the war years, Jewish actors and playwrights who were forbidden to perform elsewhere came to ply their trade, although they were not allowed to perform in Yiddish.
Later, during the Communist period, Nicolae Ceausescu, the authoritarian leader who governed Romania from the mid-1960s to 1989, tore down much of the old Jewish neighborhood to make way for his grand, Soviet-style architectural vision for the city.
Though the Communist authorities allowed performances in Yiddish, actors used the fact that many audience members relied on translations to get around some of the tight censorship.
"Because we were talking Yiddish on stage, we could say things that weren't allowed to be said in Romania," said Rudi Rosenfeld, 75, a Jewish actor who has been involved in the theater since the late 1940s. "The audience had headphones on and our colleagues were translating into Romanian, but they would skip the sensitive parts," he added.
Now, subtitles are provided on portable screens.
By the late 1980s, most of the city's Jewish population was gone. The area around the theater, once a bustling Jewish neighborhood, had gradually lost its Jewish ties. It is estimated that the Jewish population in Romania today is less than 11,000, down from around 800,000 before World War II. In Bucharest there are just a few thousand Jews left.
"There is no Jewish neighborhood now, just drawings on a map," said Gilbert Saim, an official at Choral Temple, one of the few Jewish houses of worship left in the city.
With few Yiddish speakers left in the country, audiences have been reluctant to see performances that seem so alien to today's Romania.
Now the challenge is to keep the traditions alive, while also engaging with a new generation of theatergoers.
"When I started in this place I was 18 years old," Morgenstern said. "Now I am 55. I've always thought another two years and this theater will die."
She added with a smile: "This thought has lasted for 36 years now."
Religion on 01/21/2017