After a nine-year international effort, one of the most striking artifacts in the history of Romanian Jewry — a 200-year-old Torah ark from the town of Siret — has reached its final home at the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem.
The ornate ark, which once stood in Siret’s Great Synagogue, will be shown to the public for the first time in Yad Vashem’s new exhibition, “Living Memory: Yad Vashem Collections Between Past and Future.”
Siret, a town in northern Romania near the Ukrainian border, was home to a large and vibrant Jewish community until the Holocaust. Before World War II, eight synagogues operated there. Today, no Jews remain. Most of the town’s Jews were deported in 1941 to the Transnistria camps, where only a few survived.
The Torah ark — long considered the pride of the community — survived the war and remained in the synagogue for decades. In 2016, it was discovered that the original ark had disappeared and been replaced with a crude imitation featuring incorrect Hebrew inscriptions, apparently to conceal the theft.
In 2019, Yohanan Ron-Zinger, chairman of the World Organization of Bukovina Jews, received a phone call from a friend in Chernivtsi who said he had noticed the fake ark through the synagogue’s locked doors. Ron-Zinger began investigating and discovered that the original ark had been listed for sale by an international auction house. Further inquiries revealed that it was stored in a furniture warehouse in the central Israeli city of Rishon Lezion.
The discovery led to a lengthy legal battle in both Romania and Israel. Ultimately, the ark was returned to the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania, its legal owner, and later transferred to Yad Vashem.
Yad Vashem said the arrival of the Siret ark and its inclusion in the new exhibition, which features about 400 artifacts — most on public display for the first time — marks a significant moment in its work.
“Yad Vashem’s mission is to commemorate what was lost while shaping how we remember, learn, and continue,” said Maddy Shavid, head of Yad Vashem’s Collections Division. “The exhibition ensures that the silenced voices of the victims will continue to be heard through these objects. ‘Living Memory’ is not just the name of the exhibition — it represents our values as a society that remembers, and that memory can help create a better future.”