As one of the conditions of the various peace treaties that ended World War I, Jews and other ethnic groups were to be offered Romanian citizenship, a right they had previously been denied. The new Romanian Constitution, ratified in 1923, formalized this as law.
In 1924-25 those newly eligible for citizenship submitted applications that included copies of birth certificates, marriage certificates, passports, military records, and other supporting documents in order to claim their Romanian citizenship.
What remains of the original applications of Leova residents is stored in the Moldovan State Archives in Chisinau under file numbers 2067/1/2736 and 2067/1/2737. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington DC has these records on microfilm, and was kind enough to provide digitized copies for this website.
The USHMM holdings are in two formats:
- RG54.006M Reels 148 and 149 include complete copies of files 2067/1/2736 (93 mb) and 2067/1/2737. (89 mb). In total, these two files include 1627 documents on residents of Leova, both Jews and non-Jews, who had applied for citizenship in 1924-25.
- RG54.006M Reel 93 includes "Jewish Records from files 2067/1/2736 and 2067/1/2737" (79 mb). This collection separates out the 795 documents related to Jewish residents of Leova who had applied for Romanian citizenship in 1924-25.
To aid you in your research, the Jewish records from Reel 93 are sorted below by surname.
A word about name spellings and transcriptions:
Transcription is a challenging task. Prior to 1918 Bessarabia was part of the Russian Empire and most Bessarabian Jews spoke Yiddish in the home and Russian when conversing with their neighbors. Since neither Russian or Yiddish utilize the Latin alphabet, every name written below is a transcription from another alphabet. Spelling choices made were the judgement of the various transcribers. Please keep in mind that name spellings will vary.