Romanian President Ion Iliescu will visit Montreal in September (Canadian Jewish News, June 17, 2004). For those welcoming him it is pertinent to recall a few aspects of the history of Romanian antisemitism and the destruction of Romanian Jewry. Romania has yet to come to terms with its history of antisemitism, and must do so in order to be accepted among the family of nations.

Consider one example: “…Romanian nationalism views us as a foreign element that prevents the Romanians from forming a purely Romanian middle class and concentrates in its hands huge sources of fortune. It believes that we are too numerous and don’t leave enough room for the natural element to flourish in every domain of the economy and culture. A deadly war is being waged against us. They sow hatred against us…in towns, boroughs, villages…they openly incite violence against us.”

This indictment, from the Manifesto of the Union of the Land’s Jews, with its revelations of embedded hostility toward Jews, was not made in December, 1937, on the eve of the formation of the second antisemitic government in Europe, the infamous Goga-Cuza government. In fact the Manifesto of the Union of the Land’s Jews was sent to the Romanian Parliament in February 1910, as a protest against the official antisemitic policies of all governments from 1864 on.

Antisemitic movements in Romania did not, as in other Christian countries, create the negative image of the Jew, but rather inherited—and later developed—it from Church traditions and from folk literature influenced by the Church. This image of the Jew was not the creation of a separate antisemitic movement at that time. Yet overt religiously-based anti-Jewish persecution, such as the Inquisition, the auto-da-fé, and the heresy, was virtually unknown, in contrast to other European, particularly Catholic, countries.

Another, later, major contribution to the creation of the stereotype of the Romanian Jew came from the younger generation of intellectuals and the ideological currents prevalent among them around 1859 (Union of Greater Romania). Mihail Eminescu, a greatly talented and sensitive poet, often used offensive descriptions of the Jew and his character, image and tradition to justify his rejection of any formula that might have granted any rights to Jews: “A nation gaining rights with no sacrifices and effort is the Jewish one… The Jew disregards any work, exploits the local population, is a symptom of social disease… The Jew turned European journalism into what they have turned our alcoholic beverages—poison.”

By the 1920s, the fascist, antisemitic “Iron Guard” movement had emerged. Many Romanian men of letters or representatives of the Romanian Orthodox clergy contributed to the negative image of the Jew in the minds of Romanians. By the beginning of his rule in November 1940, war criminal Ion Antonescu had already elaborated his policies toward Jews on the basis of a simple idea that incorporated all he had learned about Jews in school, in the army, from literature and from the Christian religion: “The Yids are guilty of most of the misfortunes of this country.” A year later, in July 1941, Antonescu declared; “you should be merciless… I do not know when, after how many centuries, the Romanian nation will enjoy again this total freedom of action, with the possibility for ethnic purification. This is the hour when we are masters on our territory. Let us use it! I do not mind if the world judges us as barbarians. The Roman Empire carried out a series of barbaric acts against its contemporaries and it was nevertheless the gratest [sic] political institution. If need be, shoot with the machine guns, and I say there is no law. We shall draft special laws, but don’t give up in any way thinking that the legal provisions could be introduced today and that we could be the first to infringe them tomorrow. Therefore, without any formalities and in full freedom, I take the whole responsibility and I declare, there is no law.”

Over 60 years later antisemitism is alive and well in Romania. It is present among old Iron Guardists, among the revived extreme Right in post-Ceausescu, contemporary Romania, and the right-wing media. (Let us remember that President Iliescu is a former member of the Ceausescu apparatus.) There is an old saying that “antisemitism in Romania starts with sucking the milk from the mother’s breast.” Antisemitism remains an essential and integral component of the political and socioeconomic plans and platforms of the extreme right and its supporters and active members.

Contemporary antisemitism is a peril for Romania’s “democrats.” There is an urgent need for democratic education, for instituting a curriculum for all levels of education regarding the history of antisemitism, racial discrimination, and hooliganism from the early nineteenth century on. Today Romanian television shows us the green-shirted Iron Guard in a favorable light and the press praises the fascist Iron Guard and the teaching of their “Fuhrer”—the legendary Cornelin Zelec Codreanu. And there are no school textbooks that cover the history of antisemitism in Romania. It should be noted that recently the Associated Press reported from Bucharest that “Romania denies [the] wartime massacre of Jews” and “firmly claim[s] that within the borders of Romania between 1940 and 1945, there was no Holocaust.”

In response, consider these quotations from Emil Dorian’s The Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary 1937-1944:

…something I could never have imagined—the pogrom that for two nights and two days swept through the Jewish quarter… What happened in Vacaresti, Dudesti, and the surrounding neighborhoods is indescribable… The madness of destruction and crime descended on the homes in the ghettos as well. A synagogue burned down. Another one. The majestic Sephardic synagogue has been completely destroyed. More corpses at Baneasa. The list of beaten and tortured people is endless, and crimes cover the complete range of demented imagination: Jews forced to drink gasoline with Epsom salts—crosses cut on the skin of their backs—torture and killing, on and on…” (January 21-23, 1941, Bucarest Kristallnacht)

A further account is Dr. Adrian Cernea’s The Yassi Pogrom: A Witness Testimony:

The Yassi Pogrom was not a one-day spontaneous eruption but a continuous preparation campaign for the last twenty years of antisemitic indoctrination… The Yassi death trains, a precise execution of mass murder, using trains as weapons, hermetically closed, proved the crude, cruel intention, inhuman, diabolic intention to kill… The Yassi massacre must be considered the first act in the history of the Holocaust.” (June 28 – July 6, 1941)

And let us not forget the death marches toward the Transnistria killing fields. Over 300,000 Jewish women, men, and children were barbarically murdered. The various historical accounts document that about half of Romania’s prewar Jewish population of 800,000 was killed during the war.

Former Romanian President Emil Constantinescu made numerous promises to implement the teaching of the history of the Holocaust, but did not follow through. Finally, there is reportedly some progress at the University Napoca-Cluj, where a couple of lectures on the Holocaust are being offered. The Romanian Ambassador in Ottawa has claimed that “Romania started late, but I’m sure we can catch up from behind” (Canadian Jewish News, June 17, 2004).

It remains to be seen if the Western world should accept and believe this new promise. We survivors of Romania’s Holocaust know from bitter experience its value. Only when the promise is realized will we believe it. In order for Romania to be accepted into the EU—expected by 2007—and into NATO, she must prove to the world her sincere intention to totally expunge the venom of antisemitism, and to begin officially and effectively teaching the history of the Holocaust in Romania in her schools and universities.

(Baruch Cohen is CIJR’s Research Chairman)