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After August 23, 1944 the wartime Baraşeum Theater was dissolved. The actors either returned to the theaters where they had been active before 1940 or opened new, private theaters such as the Studio Baraşeum, the Naier Idisher Teater (New Yiddish Theater) and the The IKA (Idisher Kinstler Ansambl) .
Some groups of actors hoped to bring back the tradition of Yiddish theater in the spirit of its highest level, The Vilner Trupe. This return was the basis for post World War II Yiddish theater in Romania, which combined artists' drive with the enthusiasm of a large public, amongst the high number of Holocaust survivors, about 375,000.
The initiative to reopen Yiddish theaters after August 23,1944, came from the actors and not the political bodies. However, as the Communists progressed towards full domination in Romanian, they favored IKUF (Idisher Kultur Farband) which held values similar to their ideologues.In July 1945 the IKUF (Jewish Cultural Association) established in Bucharest a new Yiddish theater, Teatrul IKUF led by Iacob Mansdorf.
Mansdorf was determined to transform the theater into an institution with a cultural, educational, and artistic agenda, and replace what he considered to be cheap shows with art. However, many of the stars of the pre-war Yiddish theater refused to be associated with this theater, as did all other centers of Jewish culture, and Mansdorf had to go outside Bucharest to recruit young actors. The theater's first production, Moşe Pincevski's new play Ich Leb (I Live) about resistance in a forced labor camp, relevant to the audiences and their experiences during the war, was a success.
Mansdorf left after two years, and some of his actors left with him. Others, including Sevilla Pastor, Dina König, and Moris Siegler reorganized under Bernard Lebli, and became the permanent company of the Baraşeum State YiddishTheater. By March 1948, whoever wanted to perform Yiddish theater had to join the IKUF.
On August 1, 1948, Teatrul IKUF became Teatrul Evreiesc de Stat, TES (The State Jewish Theater), and previous Yiddish theater troupes were united under one roof forming an ensemble of 110 actors. In this respect, TES was the result of an act of compulsion, since it forced all those interested in Yiddish theater under one roof.
From 1948 to 1954 TES was directed by Bernard Lebli and Uri Benador as artistic director, and from 1955 to 1987 by Franz Auerbach, Iancu Gluck and Israil Bercovici as artistic director. TES was located in the Baraşeum building that was in a very bad state, and in the years 1954–1956 it was rebuilt with a modern stage. The first production on the new stage was Dos togbukh fun Anna Frank (The Diary of Anne Frank) by Frances Goodrich with Lia Konig as Anne Frank.
TES included actors of the theater before the war, and young actors affiliated to the with the communist ideology. Yet, it was a continuation of the project initiated by Goldfaden and fulfilled the aspirations its founding fathers - Abraham Goldfaden, Iacob Gordin, and Iacob Sternberg - in that it provided Yiddish-language artists with a stage and a venue to keep alive artistic practices with deep roots in Eastern Europe.
Nicolae Ceauşescu, who governed Romania from 1965 to 1989, tore down much of the Văcăreşti Jewish quarter in Bucharest to make way for his grand, architectural vision for the city. TES that was The Baraşeum building, fortunately wasn't demolished.
TES promoted an ambitious artistic program, and made use of various aesthetic, narrative and innovative forms, from Stanislavski’s realism to Brecht’s techniques. Its repertoire incorporated classical Yiddish plays, masterpieces of world theater, modern works with Jewish themes, and anti-Zionist plays during the Stalinist period.
The core repertoire included Sholem Aleichem’s "The Winning Lottery Ticket," and "Tevye the Dairyman"; Avram Goldfadn’s "The Witch", Jacob Gordin’s "God, Man, and Devil", S. Ansky’s "The Dybbuk". These plays gave the theater a chance to go beyond the official level and build a bridge to the past tradition of Yiddish theater. The cast that included Dina König, Sevilla Pastor, Iudith Kronenfeld, Benno Popliker, Mauricius Sekler, Samuel Fischler, enabled that as well.
TES repertoire included also a series of plays in Yiddish dealing with the Holocaust written by Ludovic Bruckstein, a survivor of Auschwitz, between 1948 and 1969. The first to be staged in 1949 was Nachtshicht ( Night-Shift), a play describing the revolt of the Auschwitz sonderkommando before the end of World War II. Bruckstein's plays had a huge success, andThe Yiddish Theater in Iaşi, and other Theaters in Romania performed them.
With these plays, TES initiated a kind of dramatic reflection on the Holocaust and Jewish existence in post World War II Romania, at a time when this art form did not exist in any other country. This was probably due to the particular situation of the Yiddish theatre in Romania, and the Jewish audiences which were familiar with avant-garde plays dealing with actual issues of the Jewish community.
TES repertoire included also works by Romanian authors such as Victor Eftimiu Victor Ion Popa, and Tudor Arghezi, and plays from the world theater, such as Bertholt Brecht's " Three penny Opera", Reginald Rose's "Twelve Angry Men", Georg Büchner's "Woyzeck", and Lion Feuchtwanger's "Raquel, the Jewess of Toledo," and works by Jewish American writers such as Israel Horovitz and Saul Bellow.
With this repertoire, TES promoted Jewish culture by keeping Yiddish folklore and Yiddish music alive and by engaging the classics of Yiddish literature at a time when there was a large population interested in maintaining or discovering these traditions. Thus the theater was not , as initially intended, only a mouthpiece of and for the regime, but mainly a site for the cultivation of a Jewish identity.
A remarkable attempt to raise awareness of Jewish issues in Romania was made by Alexandru Mirodan in Contract special de închiriat oameni (Special Contract for Renting People, 1971), a play about the effects of anti-Semitism in an imaginary town where only one Jew is left. However, after the Communist regime prevented the play from being staged in Romania, it was published in Israel.
Despite the oppression of Jews during the Communist regime, the demolition of much of the Jewish neighborhood, and the emigration of most Jews to Israel, TES continued to operate, and has survived the fall of communism in 1989.
Today, it still operates as a public institution, is one of the few symbols of what was once a large Jewish community, and one of the few professional Yiddish theaters left in Europe. Since 2006 it has been directed by Maia Morgerstern, and continues to perform a repertoire of Yiddish classics and masterpieces of world theater.
Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches, ed. Joel Berkowitz, Oxford, 2003
Israil Bercovici, O sută de ani de teatru evreiesc în România (One hundred years of Yiddish/Jewish theater in Romania), 2nd Romanian-language edition, revised and augmented by Constantin Măciucă. Editura Integral (an imprint of Editurile Universala), Bucharest, 1998, 202- 235
Nicolae Cajal and Hary Kuller, eds. Contribuția evreilor din România la cultură şi civilizație , București, 1996
Corina L. Petrescu, " A Jewish State Theater in the People's Republic of Romania, Notes on a transitional becoming (1944-1953)" in Irina Vainovski-Mihai ed., New Europe College Yearbook, 2005-2006, 283- 31
