In loving memory of Malca z”l
It makes no difference to me that we’ll go down in history as barbarians. There has not existed a more favourable moment in our history. If it is needed, shoot all of them with machine guns. - Marshal Ion Antonescu, Romania’s Fuehrer, declaring Romanian government policy concerning the Jews on June 21, 1941. (I.C. Butnaru, The Silent Holocaust: Romania and its Jews)
In 1930, 35,462 Jews lived in Iasi, Romania. The number of Jewish people living in the city increased to 51,000 between 1940 and 1941, when surrounding villages and towns forced their local Jewish populations to vacate. However, the city of Iasi was far from accommodating and was known as a centre of anti-Semitic activity. Its Jews had suffered from pogroms initiated by Romanian fascists and students in 1899 and 1923.
Notwithstanding sporadic intervention by the Allied Forces prior to World War I, Romanian governments had consistently refused to recognise Jews as Romanian nationals. At the Versailles conference, the Romanian government reluctantly accepted a minority treaty granting Jews citizenship, but the minority statute, incorporated in the Paris Peace Treaty of 1919, was never fully honoured. With the exception of a few hundred families, most Romanian Jews remained resident aliens and suffered gross disabilities and enduring persecution. In 1937, during the Nazi-like regime of Octavian Goga, 225,000 Jews were stripped of their citizenship and an additional 91,000 were classified as foreigners.
In 1930, the infamous Iron Guard was created in Romania, as a successor of the Christian National Defence League, founded in 1923. On September 8, 1940, Marshal Ion Antonescu proclaimed Iasi to be the capital of the Iron Guard under the Fascist-Nazi regime. It was at this time that the persecution of the city’s Jews began, by measures taken against them such as arbitrary arrests, extortion, property confiscation, seizure of businesses, and trials of suspects charged with belonging to the illicit Communist Party. In November, 1940, two majestic synagogues were destroyed on orders of the Iron Guard.
On the eve of war against the Soviet Union, Romanian military authorities were stationed at Iasi, which was also an assembly point for Romanian and German army units. On June 28, 1941, following the circulation of false rumours that Jews had abetted Soviet planes bombing the city, assaults on the Jewish people living in Iasi began. These pogroms were organised by the members of the Romanian Special Intelligence Service, the liaison office with the German military. In Christian homes in Romania, crosses and icons were displayed, as well as placards proclaiming “Here live Christians, not Jydani (Jews)”.
On Saturday, June 28, 1941, air raid sirens were sounded as a false war signal that had actually been pre-planned by the organisers of the impending Jewish massacre. Later that night, the sky was lit up with rocket fire as a signal to begin the slaughter.
On June 29, 1941, dubbed Duminica Aceia (Black Sunday) by the Romanian Jewish population, thousands of Jews were arrested, and then shot by Romanian soldiers outside police headquarters. An additional 4,300 Jews were placed in closed cargo vans and then crowded into cattle cars on trains, where 2,650 people died of thirst or suffocation. Many of those who survived suffered extreme emotional and mental trauma. This was deemed, with a tone of disgust, “an uncivilised method” by the Nazi Governor Wachter, of Krakow, as reported by the Italian journalist Curzio Malaparte, in his famous book, Kaput.
June 29, 1941 became the bloodiest day in the history of the Jews in Romania. Duminica Aceia signalled the beginning of The Final Solution, the German Nazi scheme to remove Jewish existence on European soil.
No other country has had a darker record in the treatment of its Jews than Romania. It was the most virulently anti-Semitic country in pre-war Europe, its anti-Semitism vitriolic and venomous, unparalleled in Eastern Europe with the possible exception of Poland.
Romania was Germany’s most devoted satellite state, an ardent military ally, and not a conquered country. According to Nora Levin in The Holocaust, an estimated 14,000 Jews were massacred in Iasi on that Sunday known as Duminica Aceia.
To this day, the truth about the Iasi massacre, in which Jews were bludgeoned to death with utmost barbarity, is not acknowledged by Romanian authorities, the Romanian Orthodox Church or by Romanian historians and academics. The official version propagated is remarkably inadequate: “In Iasi, 500 Jewish communists were executed. They fired at German and Romanian soldiers from their homes” (The Office of the President of the Council of Ministers; cited by Radu Ioanid, The Holocaust in Romania). To this day, after sixty-five years, the Romanian anti-Semitic press feeds the public this flagrant lie.
Romania is today the only country in post-war Europe that has erected monuments, named streets and constructed plaques honouring the Nazi Iron Guard leadership of the most dark and terrible time of Romanian history.
Remember! Zakor!
June 29, 1941—Duminica Aceia (preceded by the “Bucharest Kristalnacht” on January 21-23, 1941) became the starting signal - not only for the Romanian Nazi regime, but also for all of Europe conquered by the Nazi regimes – to annihilate, to murder, six million Jews, including 350,000 Romanian Jews.
Zakor! Remember!
The Jewish community of Iasi, established in the sixteenth century, was known for its highly developed cultural life, its Zionist and Hassidic movements, and its renowned community member, Abraham Goldfaden, who organized the world’s first professional Yiddish theatre in Iasi.
In 2006, the Iasi Jewish community numbers just 260-280 families!
Zakor! Remember!
Sources
The Silent Holocaust – Romania and its Jews, by I.C. Butnaru. Greenwood; New York, 1992.
Encyclopaedia of the Holocaust, by Israel Gutman, Editor. Simon and Schuster-Macmillan, 1995.
The Holocaust in Romania, by Dr. Radu Ioanid. Ivan R. Dee. Chicago/Washington, D.C., 2000.
The Holocaust, by Nora Levin. Thomas Y. Crowell, New York, 1968.
