State Jewish Theater (Romania) - The State Jewish Theater

The State Jewish Theater

After the rise of Communism in Romania, the IKUF theater was nationalized August 1, 1948 as the State Jewish Theater (Teatrul Evreiesc de Stat, TES). This made it the first state-operated Yiddish theater in the world; a second Romanian State Jewish Theater was established in Iaşi in 1949, but went out of existence in 1964.

TES has operated in the former Baraşeum building almost continually since that time. In 1954–1956 the theater building was rebuilt with a modern stage; the company appeared on a number of other Bucharest stages during that time. In 1955 Franz Auerbach became head of the theater with Iancu Gluck as General Manager and Israil Bercovici as literary secretary. Over the next two decades, these three would doubtless do as much as anyone in the world to keep the flame of Yiddish theater alive. (Auerbach's successor, Harry Eliad, continues to run the theater as of 2005.)

The first production on the new stage in their building (now called, like the company, Teatrul Evreiesc de Stat, but still sometimes referred to as the Baraşeum) was The Diary of Anne Frank, with Samuel Fischler as Otto Frank. For four years (1957–1961), TES also operated a studio theater to train young actors and stage technicians, in which some of the surviving greats of Yiddish theater taught their crafts to a new generation.

The company toured to Israel in 1968, to the United States and Canada in 1972, and to East Berlin in 1977.

The repertoire of TES has included many works with music by their own Haim Schwartzman. They have performed traditional works of the Yiddish theater, and new plays by Ludovic Bruckstein, (or I.L. or Leibush Brukstein, 1920-1988) who wrote between 1948 and 1969 a series of plays both in Yiddish and Romanian. Bruckstein, a survivor of Auschwitz and several other concentration-camps, wrote in 1948 a play entitled "Night-Shift" (Nachtshicht, in Yiddish) describing the revolt of the Auschwitz sonderkommando towards the end of the Second World-War, and the play had a huge success over the years 1949-1958. Subsequently, TES, The Yiddish Theater in Iaşi, and other Theaters in Romania played a series of his plays, (The Grunwald Family in 1952, The Return of Christopher Columbus, 1955, Dor Hamidbar, or The Desert Generation in 1957, An Unfinished Trial in 1961, White Night, 1963, and Meeting on the Mountain in 1969), and Bruckstein became, before his 1972 emigration to Israel, the most important Yiddish playwright of post-war Romania, as mentioned in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, see also YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe on Romanian literature.

TES also staged works by Romanian playwrights such as Victor Eftimiu, Victor Ion Popa, Tudor Arghezi, and Lucia Demetrius, and but also a vast array of works from world theater: Bertholt Brecht's Threepenny Opera, Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men, Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Lion Feuchtwanger's Raquel, The Jewess of Toledo, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Frank V. More recent additions to their repertoire include works by Israel Horovitz and Ray Cooney, and an adaptation by Dorel Dorian of Saul Bellow's Herzog.

During the Communist era, TES had some interesting exchanges with other Romanian theaters. TES's Mauriciu Sekler directed Brecht's Mother Courage at the National Theater; Franz Auerbach directed several plays are the State German Theater in Timişoara. Conversely, non-Jewish actors such as George Trodorescu, Lucu Andreescu, Ştefan Hablinski, and Dan Jitianu played major roles in productions at TES.

Despite significant repression of Jews during some phases of the Communist regime, despite significant emigration of Romanian Jews, and despite the demolition of much of the Văcăreşti neighborhood in anticipation of a never-finished portion of Centrul Civic, the theater continued to operate until the end of the communist era in the Romanian Revolution of 1989. It still continues today (as of 2007) as a public institution, receiving a subsidy from the General Council of the Municipality of Bucharest. Along with the nearby Jewish Museum, it is one of the two most prominent remaining secular Jewish institutions in Romania, continuing what Bercovici called "a tradition of humanist theater".