Romania’s Holocaust 1940: Baruch Cohen, Isranet, Jan. 17, 2019— “I was born in Bucharest to a non-practicing Jewish family.”
How an American Moses Helped Lead Romania’s Jews to the Promised Land: Ben Zehavi, Times of Israel, Nov. 27, 2018—With a few obvious exceptions, there was a hardly a worse place to be a Jew in the 20th century than Romania.
Antisemitism Is Alive and Well in Europe — If It Ever Left: Manfred Gerstenfeld, Algemeiner, Jan. 16, 2019— Saying that antisemitism is integral to European culture does not make one popular in Europe.
The New, New Anti-Semitism: Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, Jan. 15, 2019— The old anti-Semitism was mostly, but not exclusively, a tribal prejudice expressed in America up until the mid 20th century most intensely on the right.
On Topic Links
Holocaust Survivor Baruch Cohen – the Bucharest Pogrom (Video): Musée de l’Holocauste Montréal, Youtube, Sep. 28, 2018
How Does the Holocaust Continue to Affect Us Today?: Rachel Avraham, Jerusalem Online, Jan. 7, 2019
Hitler Didn’t Care About Your Race: Varda Meyers Epstein, Jewish Press, Jan. 13, 2019
Can the Left Recognize Anti-Semitism in its Ranks?: Jonathan Marks, Commentary, Jan. 14, 2019
ROMANIA’S HOLOCAUST 1940
Baruch Cohen
Isranet, 2004
“I was born in Bucharest to a non-practicing Jewish family. My knowledge of and interest in Judaism came from observing the traditions while visiting my maternal grandparents in Cernovitz. However, I was only able to truly understand the full implications of being Jewish, when I was preparing to enter my second year of high school. At that time, my parents were advised that under the new racial laws of Romania, my attendance at school was not only undesirable, but also prohibited by Antonescu’s laws against the Jews…
In a very short time, the formerly middle-class family found itself in a terrible state of uncertainty, economically stranded and in fear for its future. The news about Jews being plundered, beaten and murdered throughout Romania and in certain areas of Bucharest became a reality during the Rebellion of the Legionnaires in 1941.”
–Sonia Palty, “Jews, Cross the Dniester!” in Felicia (Steigman) Carmelly, Shattered! 50 Years of Silence: History and Voices of the Tragedy in Romania and Transnistria (Scarborough: Abbeyfield), 328.
A year after denying that the mass murder of Jews took place on Romanian territory, Romania’s president Ion Iliescu finally acknowledged his nation’s role in the Holocaust (Montreal Gazette, June 14, 2003, November 12, 2004). “The Holocaust tragedy was possible due to the complicity of leaders of state institutions,” he admitted. President Iliescu then announced the establishment of a national memorial day for the Holocaust victims: October 9. Elie Wiesel, himself a Holocaust survivor, headed a commission to investigate the Holocaust in Romania. In presenting the commission’s results, he said: “I didn’t know there was so much brutality, that the anti-Semitism was such a pure anti-Semitism, with nothing to do with racism or economics. Why did it take so long for me to learn that?”
There was no mass deportation to Auschwitz from Romania proper, but that does not mean that there was not a Holocaust in Romania. The anti-Semitic legislation in Romania started in December 1937, and even before this began, Jews were subjected to severe policies of discrimination and exclusion from Romanian society. Many Romanian men of letters or representatives of the Romanian orthodox clergy contributed to the negative image of the Jew in the conscience of that epoch. By the beginning of his rule in November 1940, Ion Antonescu had already elaborated his policies toward Jews in schools, and in the army, from literature and from the Christian religion: “The Yids…are guilty of most of the misfortunes of this country” (Pe Marginea Prapastiei, Volume 1, Bucharest, 1941–in Romanian.)
On August 3, 1995, the Gazette began to publish the first horrific accounts of Romanian Holocaust survivors (see “Survivors of Romanian killing fields form Holocaust group.”) I am a Holocaust survivor of the January 21-23, 1941 pogrom, which I call the “Bucharest Kristallnacht.” For three days (January 24, 25, and 26, 1941) I searched for my missing father. I searched the Bucharest slaughter house, and saw bodies with “Kosher Meat” tags hanging from their bellies. I visited the morgue and the Jilava forest outside Bucharest, where the corpses were lying. Luckily, my father had gone into hiding, in the home of a righteous gentile, and survived.
I do not care what President Iliescu, or the commission, thinks. The uncovering of the terrible atrocities Romanian Jews endured has been long overdue. In the Iasi pogrom of June 28-July 6, 1941, 13,000 Jews were killed; in autumn 1941, over 250,000 Jews were deported and murdered in the Transnistria killing fields. Thousands of Jews deported from cities like Viznitza, Licpani, Nova Sulitza, Soroca, Vertujeni, Dorohoi, Hertza, Podul Iloaye, Ploesti, Craiova, Concesht, Hunedoara, Brashov, Timishoara, Arad, Mogilev, Shargorod, Dubossary and Peciora. My wife’s grandmother perished during a “death march” toward Transnistria; she was shot dead by a Romanian soldier. The rest of the family had to continue marching. Many others were beaten and tortured by the Romanian Army. It is a little late to begin talking about responsibility now.
I am now 85 years old. How many survivors are left to hear President Iliescu’s acknowledgement of Romania’s complicity in the Holocaust? There were close to 800,000 Romanian Jews before World War II started. In 1950, their number was around 300,000. Today, there are only 6000-8000 Jews in Romania, most of them elderly and frail, but antisemitism is alive and well. The Romanian media and television glorify the Iron Guard, spreading their fascist venom. In Romanian schools and universities, there is no curriculum to teach the new generation about the role played by Romanian authorities and the Romanian army in persecuting, humiliating, deporting, and killing their Jewish citizens.
Finally, it is long overdue for President Iliescu to acknowledge the crimes committed against Romanian Jewish citizens in the period of 1940-1944 by the Romanian army and Romanian authorities. It is crucial that the commission’s 400-page document be made available to the Romanian people, and it must be taught in all Romanian schools and universities. This document must be a permanent chapter in the Romanian history of the years 1940-1944. The Romanian Holocaust, its crimes against the Romanian Jews, was possible only with the complicity of leaders of the Romanian state institutions. To raise a new generation educated about that horrible past–in order to eliminate the “teaching of contempt” forever–is now imperative.
Romania’s annual October 9 commemoration, even if it is observed, will not mean much without a sincere and detailed enumeration of the crimes committed during those tragic years, a period which taints the history of contemporary, modern Romania. The full disclosure of the commission report must be the basis of all future curricula, in all the state and private educational institutions in Romania. The Romanian authorities must also ensure the payment of restitution for all Jewish properties, stolen or confiscated by the Romanian state during the Holocaust years 1940-1944. Now that Romania is to become a NATO partner by 2007, Romania must provide a clear balance of payments, moral and material, for the crimes and theft committed in the years 1940-1944. A still-tainted Romanian state has no place in the West’s NATO alliance.
*Baruch Cohen z”l, the Canadian Institute or Jewish Research’s long-time Research Chairman, passed away at 98 on October 3, 2018. An active member of the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, he was a major figure in the successful campaign to throw light on the long-neglected reality of the Holocaust in Romania. This article, originally published by CIJR in 2004, commemorates the anniversary of the ‘Bucharest Kristallnacht” antisemitic pogrom of January 21-23, 1940. {See the “Link” section below for a video of Baruch Cohen speaking on this issue.)
HOW AN AMERICAN MOSES HELPED LEAD
ROMANIA’S JEWS TO THE PROMISED LAND
Ben Zehavi
Times of Israel, Nov. 27, 2018
With a few obvious exceptions, there was a hardly a worse place to be a Jew in the 20th century than Romania. During the Holocaust, about half of the region’s approximately 300,000 Jews were exterminated. In the following four decades of Communist rule, the community faced severe restrictions, including a strict limit on the number of Jews allowed to emigrate to Israel. But by the end of the century, Romania began shedding its history of economic stagnation and political repression, and began instituting democratic reforms. Today, it is part of NATO, boasts EU membership, and has a vibrant civil society, a relatively free press, and an independent judiciary, though significant challenges remain.
Now, a new book by Alfred Moses — an 89-year-old American Jewish attorney whose work with Romanian Jews in the 1970s and ’80s earned him the ambassadorship to Bucharest under president Bill Clinton — recounts Romania’s journey from a communist dictatorship to a Western-style democracy. “Bucharest Diary: Romania’s Journey from Darkness to Light” is an essential read for anyone interested in the region’s general and Jewish history. It’s by a modern-day Moses — a man who was more responsible for letting his people go to Israel than any other figure.
Moses first traveled to Bucharest in 1976 as part of an American Jewish Committee delegation. Romania at the time was under the iron rule of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. “On the trip, I was approached by a couple of young men who asked if I was American, and if I was Jewish,” Moses told The Times of Israel in a recent interview. “I said ‘Yes,’ and then they began pouring out stories about how everything is blamed on the Jews, and how terrible life was for Romanian Jews. For the next 13 years, I got the Jews out of Romania.”
Working with American Jewish and government leaders, Moses successfully lobbied the US Congress to extend the most-favored-nation status annually for Romania in return for, among other things, Ceausescu allowing its Jews to emigrate to Israel. “We spoke to Ceausescu himself no less than three times. During this period, I visited 18 different local Romanian communities and worked hand-in-hand with the country’s chief rabbi,” said Moses. According to its census, there were nearly 25,000 Jews in Romania in 1977. By 1992, there were fewer than 9,000. (The last count in 2011 recorded 3,271 Romanian Jews).
Another of Moses’s legacies is the saving of Bucharest’s Great Synagogue, the oldest house of worship in the Romanian capital, in 1985. “I got a call from the Romanian chief rabbi who said Ceausescu was clearing two square miles of downtown Bucharest to clear space for his new ‘City of the People,’ and two of the buildings in the path of destruction were the Sephardi synagogue and the Great Synagogue,” Moses said. The Israeli ambassador and the mayor of Bucharest tried feverishly to save the edifices and received assurances from Ceausescu that neither building would be harmed. But the ambassador shortly thereafter walked around the block and saw that the Sephardi synagogue was gone. It had been destroyed the night before.
“Suspecting the Great Synagogue was next, he went to the chief rabbi. The chief rabbi called me, and I went to the US State Department and got total support all the way up to [US Secretary of State George] Schulz, who intervened with the Romanian foreign minister,” said Moses. “He told the minister that if the Great Synagogue were destroyed, the US would ‘rethink its relationship with Romania,’ and that saved the Great Synagogue, which still stands today,” he said. By the time Moses took up residence as US Ambassador to Romania in 1994, nearly all of Romania’s once-thriving Jewish community was gone, the majority to Israel…[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.] Contents
ANTISEMITISM IS ALIVE AND WELL IN EUROPE — IF IT EVER LEFT
Manfred Gerstenfeld
Algemeiner, Jan. 16, 2019
Saying that antisemitism is integral to European culture does not make one popular in Europe. This does not change if one notes that articulating this fact is radically different from saying that most Europeans are antisemites. Still, that claim about European culture is not difficult to prove. In fact, it developed in a dominating Christian environment over more than a millennium. Major incitement against Jews initially stemmed from the Catholic Church. Later, several Protestant churches, including the Lutherans, promoted Jew-hatred. The Holocaust was executed by Germans, with the help of many European Nazi allies — and it was facilitated by the Christian infrastructure of antisemitic feelings in Europe that had accumulated over centuries.
During the Enlightenment and thereafter, leading European thinkers expressed hate against Jews. Voltaire, several German philosophers, early French socialists, Karl Marx, and many others took part in what can only be described as an antisemitic hate fest. After World War II, many people thought that the Holocaust had taught Europeans a hard lesson. Antisemitism seemed to fade away, especially after some highly-acclaimed movies and other forms of mass media that reached a huge audience.
Nevertheless, classic antisemitism targeting Jews continued to exist. Polls by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) exposed that the belief that Jews are responsible for the death of Christ is alive and well in Europe — indeed, it was found that 46 percent of Poles, 38 percent of Hungarians, 21 percent of Danes and Spaniards, and 19 percent of Norwegians and Belgians believe this. So do 18 percent of Austrians and Britons, and 16 percent of the Dutch, 15 percent of Italians, and 14 percent of Germans.
Once an attitude is an ingrained part of a culture, it takes a long time to “wash it out.” On the other hand, political correctness made it impossible in recent decades for respectable Europeans to self-define as antisemites. Thus, the hatred mutated in recent decades, and a third major generation of antisemitism developed: anti-Israelism, which targets the Jewish state. The inroads that this hatred has made in Europe were shown in a 2011 study conducted by the University of Bielefeld in Germany, where it emerged that at least 150 million adult EU citizens agreed with the statement that Israel is conducting “a war of extermination against the Palestinians.”
If that were really the case, hardly any Palestinians would still be alive. Yet to the contrary, the number of Palestinians has increased over the past decades. The persistent myth of Jews being responsible for the killing of Jesus has partly mutated into a new myth: Israel committing a non-existent genocide of Palestinians. In another new mutation of antisemitism, European Jews are nowadays accused of being responsible for Israel’s actions. A December 2018 study by the Fundamental Rights Agency shows that this idea ranks among the most frequent expressions of antisemitism in many European countries. Another aspect of antisemitism in Europe is the return of the word “Jew” as a general curse word. It is also used as an invective by non-Jews against other non-Jews.
State antisemitism against Jews has become marginal in the EU. If one applies the definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, however, both the EU and many of its member countries commit antisemitic acts by singling Israel out for discrimination at the UN and elsewhere. Despite all this, there are hardly any non-Jews pointing out that antisemitism is part of European culture. One of the very few such voices is the head of the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. He has said that antisemitism is entrenched in British culture. In 2017 at Yad Vashem, he observed that “within European culture, the root of all racism, I think, is found in antisemitism. It goes back more than 1,000 years in Europe. Within our Christian tradition, there has been century upon century of these terrible, terrible hatreds in which one people … [is] hated more specifically, more violently, more determinedly, more systematically than any other people.” And he is right. Contents
THE NEW, NEW ANTI-SEMITISM
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review, Jan. 15, 2019
The old anti-Semitism was mostly, but not exclusively, a tribal prejudice expressed in America up until the mid 20th century most intensely on the right. It manifested itself from the silk-stocking country club and corporation (“gentlemen’s agreement”) to the rawer regions of the Ku Klux Klan’s lunatic fringe. While liberals from Joe Kennedy to Gore Vidal were often openly anti-Semitic, the core of traditional anti-Semitism, as William F. Buckley once worried, was more rightist. And such fumes still arise among the alt-right extremists.
Yet soon a new anti-Semitism became more insidious, given that it was a leftist phenomenon among those quick to cite oppression and discrimination elsewhere. Who then could police the bigotry of the self-described anti-bigotry police? The new form of the old bias grew most rapidly on the 1960s campus and was fueled by a number of leftist catalysts. The novel romance of the Palestinians and corresponding demonization of Israel, especially after the 1967 Six-Day War, gradually allowed former Jew-hatred to be cloaked by new rabid and often unhinged opposition to Israel. In particular, these anti-Semites fixated on Israel’s misdemeanors and exaggerated them while excusing and downplaying the felonies of abhorrent and rogue nations.
Indeed, evidence of the new anti-Semitism was that the Left was neutral, and even favorable, to racist, authoritarian, deadly regimes of the then Third World while singling out democratic Israel for supposed humanitarian crimes. By the late 1970s, Israelis and often by extension Jews in general were demagogued by the Left as Western white oppressors. Israel’s supposed victims were romanticized abroad as exploited Middle Easterners. And by extension, Jews were similarly exploiting minorities at home.
Then arose a relatively new mainstream version of Holocaust denial that deprived Jews of any special claim to historic victim status. And it was a creed common among World War II revisionists and some American minorities who were resentful that the often more successful Jews might have experienced singularly unimaginable horror in the past. The new anti-Semitism that grew up in the 1960s was certainly in part legitimized by the rise of overt African-American bigotry against Jews (and coupled by a romantic affinity for Islam). It was further nursed on old stereotypes of cold and callous Jewish ghetto storeowners (e.g., “The Pawnbroker” character), and expressed boldly in the assumption that black Americans were exempt from charges of bias and hatred.
Anti-Semitic blacks assumed that they could not be credibly charged with bigotry and were therefore free to say what they pleased about Jews. Indeed, by the 1970s and 1980s, anti-Semitism had become the mother’s milk of a prominent post–Martin Luther King Jr. black-activist leadership, well beyond Malcolm X and the Black Panthers — even though Jews had been on the forefront of the civil-rights movements and had been recognized as such by an earlier generation of liberal black leaders. Soon it became common for self-described black leaders to explain, to amplify, to contextualize, or to be unapologetic about their anti-Semitism, in both highbrow and lowbrow modes: James Baldwin (“Negroes are anti-Semitic because they’re anti-white”), Louis Farrakhan (“When they talk about Farrakhan, call me a hater, you know what they do, call me an anti-Semite. Stop it. I am anti-termite. The Jews don’t like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that’s a great name. Hitler was a very great man”), Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”), Al Sharpton (“If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house”), and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright (“The Jews ain’t gonna let him [Obama] talk to me”)…
In the past ten years, however, we have seen an emerging new, new anti-Semitism. It is likely to become far more pernicious than both the old-right and new-left versions, because it is not just an insidiously progressive phenomenon. It has also become deeply embedded in popular culture and is now rebranded with acceptable cool among America’s historically ignorant youth. In particular, the new, new bigotry is “intersectional.” It serves as a unifying progressive bond among “marginalized” groups such as young Middle Easterners, Muslims, feminists, blacks, woke celebrities and entertainers, socialists, the “undocumented,” and student activists. Abroad, the new, new bigotry is fueled by British Labourites and anti-Israel EU grandees.
Of course, the new, new anti-Semitism’s overt messages derive from both the old and the new. There is the same conspiratorial idea that the Jews covertly and underhandedly exert inordinate control over Americans (perhaps now as grasping sports-franchise owners or greedy hip-hop record executives). But the new, new anti-Semitism has added a number of subtler twists, namely that Jews are part of the old guard whose anachronistic standards of privilege block the emerging new constituency of woke Muslims, blacks, Latinos, and feminists. Within the Democratic party, such animus is manifested by young woke politicians facing an old white hierarchy. Progressive activist Linda Sarsour oddly singled out for censure Senate majority leader Charles Schumer, saying, “I’m talking to Chuck Schumer. I’m tired of white men negotiating on the backs of people of color and communities like ours.”…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
CIJR Wishes All Our Friends & Supporters: Shabbat Shalom!
On Topic Links
Holocaust Survivor Baruch Cohen – the Bucharest Pogrom (Video): Musée de l’Holocauste Montréal, Youtube, Sep. 28, 2018—Baruch Cohen was born in 1919 in Bucharest, Romania. He survived the Holocaust in Romania, spending many months in forced labor. In this excerpt he describes what he calls the ‘Bucharest Kristallnacht’: three days of looting, destruction and killings carried out by the Iron Guard in Bucharest in 1941.
How Does the Holocaust Continue to Affect Us Today?: Rachel Avraham, Jerusalem Online, Jan. 7, 2019—On the eve of International Holocaust Memorial Day, Rachel Avraham interviewed internationally acclaimed anti-Semitism expert Manfred Gerstenfeld and discussed how the Holocaust continues to affect us to date.
Hitler Didn’t Care About Your Race: Varda Meyers Epstein, Jewish Press, Jan. 13, 2019—Jews are white when the left wants to exclude them from participation in, for instance, the Women’s March. Jews, on the other hand, are anything but white when the right wishes to exclude them from normative society.
Can the Left Recognize Anti-Semitism in its Ranks?: Jonathan Marks, Commentary, Jan. 14, 2019—When it comes to anti-Semitism on the left, the political scientist Mira Sucharov can be too cautious. In 2016, after a speaker at Vassar College gave what seemed to me and many others an obviously anti-Semitic talk, Sucharov seemed to agree.
