The Israeli and U.S. ambassadors joined Romania's foreign minister and dozens of historians yesterday to mark the 65th anniversary of the country's worst pogrom during World War II, when almost 15,000 Jews were killed.

In June 1941, under the pro-Nazi government of Marshal Ion Antonescu, 14,850 Jews were killed. Many were taken from their homes in the northeastern city of Iasi and put on cargo trains for several days where they died of heat, thirst and suffocation. Others were shot dead by members of the military.

Some 50 researchers of contemporary history from the U.S., Germany, Israel, Romania, Moldova and Ukraine attended the commemoration, as did 150 Romanian Jews who emigrated to Israel.

Israeli ambassador Rodica Radian Gordon said she welcomed the commemoration.

"I salute a desire to create a society that is well informed and open to democracy," she said. But she warned against the prevalence of racist slogans sung in soccer stadiums in Romania, and fascist symbols used during an anti-homosexual march earlier this month.

U.S. Ambassador Nicholas Taubman described the pogrom as "one of the most heinous events of the Holocaust in Romania."

He urged Romanians "to become more familiar with the true history of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism in Romania."

President Traian Basecu sent a message recalling that residents were impassive and in some cases participated in the pogrom. "It is our duty now to show human solidarity, to [Jews] today for the suffering and deaths of those 65 years ago," he said.

An international panel of historians set up in 2004 to investigate the Holocaust in Romania said Antonescu's regime was responsible for the deaths of 280,000 to 380,000 Jews and more than 11,000 Gypsies during World War II.

The government officially took responsibility last year for the actions of Romanian authorities during World War II, and has introduced Holocaust studies in schools' curricula.

Last year, Foreign Minister Mihai Razvan Ungureanu opened a Jewish Studies Center at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi.

During communist times, official history taught that Germans were the sole perpetrators of the Holocaust, ignoring the involvement of Romania's wartime leaders.

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