While the small, mainly elderly Jewish population faces no serious threat, the efforts of a highly vocal fringe element to incite xenophobic and antisemitic sentiment are of concern. Romania's continued failure to overcome the economic legacy of the Communist period does not bode well for the future of democracy in the country.
Demographic data
Total population: 23.1 million
Jewish population: 9,000-15,000 (mainly in Bucharest)
Other minorities: Roma (2 million), Hungarians (1.6 million), Germans (0.5 per cent)
Political data
Political system: constitutional democracy
Government: after the 1996 general elections, a ruling coalition was formed by the Romanian Democratic Convention (CDR) and the Union of Social Democrats (USD) joining forces with the Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania (UDMR), along with a number of smaller constituent parties
Head of government: Prime Minister Radu Vasile
Head of state: President Emil Constantinescu (since November 1996)
Economic data
GDP 1997: US$34.842 billion (about US$1,547 per capita) (US State Department Human Rights Report 1998)
Inflation 1998: 41 per cent (US State Department Human Rights Report 1998)
Unemployment February 1999: 1.3 million (10.3 per cent of workforce) (National Statistical Board, RFE-RL Newsline, 2 February 1999)
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Romania was generally considered one of the most antisemitic countries in Europe. Following foreign pressure, citizenship was granted to Jews on a collective basis only after 1923, but this step was resented by many political parties, as well as large segments of the general population.
Antisemitism emerged as a powerful influence on the country's political life in the 1920s with the establishment of the Legion of the Archangel Saint Michael - also known as the Iron Guard and the All for the Country Party - by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu in June 1927 (see also Parties, organizations, movements). Many points included in the antisemitic programme of the Legion were made into law by the Goga-Cuza government, which lasted only from 27 December 1937 to 11 February 1938. On 14 September 1940 General (later Marshal) Ion Antonescu set up, with the help of the Iron Guard, the National Legionary State. In January 1941, following an abortive rebellion against Antonescu's rule, the Iron Guard was banned. A part of the Jewish population was deported to the Transdniester region during Romania's occupation of this territory after the outbreak of the Second World War. Many of those deported met their death. Atrocities were also committed by the Romanian army against the Jewish population living in the occupied territories. A total of 25,000 Jews (some sources say 19,000) were burned alive by the Romanian army in Odessa on 23 October 1941 on orders from Antonescu, as a retaliatory measure against an attack by partisans on the army's headquarters in the town. There were also pogroms against the Jews in Romania proper.
The number of Romanian Jews exterminated in the Holocaust is subject to dispute. According to historians, between 250,000 and 300,000 Romanian Jews perished in the territories that were under Romanian jurisdiction during the Second World War. This figure does not include the approximately 150,000 Jews from Northern Transylvania who were exterminated in 1944 either by the Hungarian authorities or by the Germans, who deported them to concentration camps with the collaboration of the Hungarian government.
After the war several Jews were prominent in the leadership of the Communist Party of Romania (PCR). Of these, the best known are Ana Pauker and Iosif Chisinevschi. At no point after the Communist takeover, however, was the PCR's leadership composed of a majority, or even a plurality, of Jews. Pauker was a victim of Stalin's antisemitic campaign, which was shrewdly exploited by the party's first secretary, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (who was no less a Stalinist than Pauker), in order to remove a political adversary. Chisinevschi survived politically until 1958, when he was caught attempting to strike an 'unholy alliance' with some Stalinist-turned-liberal elements in the party in an effort to emulate the Khrushchev line in the USSR.
In 1964 Dej adopted a neo-nationalist policy, which reached a new peak under Nicolae Ceausescu, who succeeded him as party leader in March 1965. Although under Ceausescu antisemitism was never officially endorsed, it was condoned and occasionally appeared in the press and in literary works by authors closely associated with the presidential couple. The most prominent of these authors, the Ceausescu hagiographers Eugen Barbu and Corneliu Vadim Tudor (who eventually became the leader of the PRM, see Parties, organizations, movements), re-emerged in prominent positions in Romania's antisemitic circles in 1990-1.
Since the fall of the Ceausescu regime in December 1989 the rights of the Jewish minority have been fully respected.
On 26 March 1997 Romania libera reported that Justin Tambozie, a Partidul Unitati Nationale Romanesti (PUNR) senator, had asked the prosecutor-general to initiate legal proceedings for the rehabilitation of Romania's war-time fascist leader Marshal Ion Antonescu, who was executed in 1946. A similar demand was repeatedly made by PUNR deputy Petre Turlea. Tambozie also demanded that the government erect a commemorative statue of Antonescu. Three such statutes have already been erected by private sponsors.
On 7 November 1997, in an interview with a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty correspondent in Berlin, President Constantinescu said he realized the prosecutor-general's decision to start proceedings for the rehabilitation of six members of Marshal Ion Antonescu's government had 'delicate international implications'.
Ten days later US Senator Alfonso D'Amato and US Congressman Christopher Smith protested to President Constantinescu about the Romanian prosecutor-general's decision. They said all six officials were 'cabinet members in a government that was responsible for the persecution of the entire Romanian Jewish community and the deportation and murder of at least 250,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews'. Their rehabilitation 'would call into question the sincerity of Romania's commitment to the West's most fundamental shared values and is likely to trigger a reassessment of support for Romania's candidacy for membership in our economic and security institutions'.
On 21 November 1997 Prosecutor-General Sorin Moisescu said the six ministers did not share any responsibility for the decisions of that war-time cabinet. He noted that Romania's constitution had been 'suspended' in 1940 and all power transferred to Antonescu, who was designated the country's 'leader'. Consequently, neither collective government nor personal responsibility applied under those circumstances. However, on 22 November, Moisescu announced that his office was halting all the proceedings.
The 1.6 million Hungarians constitute the most vocal minority in the country. A 1995 law on education deals with the right of the Hungarian minority to be educated in their own language. Although the law was considered by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe's (OSCE) high commissioner for national minorities to be in line with European and international standards, it took away the right of Hungarians to take university entrance examinations in Hungarian for subjects not taught in Hungarian, and dictated that certain vocational schools use only Romanian, which, some Hungarians argue, would disadvantage ethnic Hungarians who work in these areas.
Promises to the Hungarian population to change these aspects of the law were not kept by the ruling coalition, some of whose members joined forces with the opposition in parliament in their attempts to block the initiatives. The Hungarians have also been unable to obtain approval for a law that would have re-established the Hungarian-language university in Cluj which was abolished in 1958. The government has instead pledged to set up a 'multicultural' university with tuition in German and Hungarian, but has also encountered resistance to implementing the promise from the ranks of the opposition as well as from parliamentary members of the coalition, including the education minister, Andrei Marga.
The Roma population, estimated at 2 million persons, continues to be subject to widespread societal discrimination. The minister of education announced in April 1998 a series of initiatives designed to improve Roma education. New programmes will provide caravan classrooms to follow the migrant Rom population, and will open additional classrooms at the request of Roma in several secondary schools throughout the country.
Credible reports of anti-Rom violence continue to emerge, as do those of the harassment of Roma. In July 1998 a court in Mures sentenced eleven people who in 1993 burned thirteen Rom houses - resulting in the deaths of three Roma - to three to seven years' imprisonment. Other cases dating back to 1993 involving Rom deaths and property destruction are still under investigation by prosecutors or under review by the courts.
On 16 November 1998 Gheorghe Funar, the ultra-nationalist mayor of Cluj, and leader of the far-right Partidul Unitati Nationale Romanesti (PUNR, Party of Romanian National Unity), joined the chauvinist Partidul Romania Mare (PRM, Greater Romania Party) as its secretary general. While the PUNR remains a nationalist party, following its poor electoral performance in 1996 some of its members considered that Funar's excessive ultra-nationalist stance had damaged the party's support among the electorate.
On 29 November 1998 the Romanian news agency Mediafax reported that the Legionary movement, also known as the Iron Guard, planned to register as a political party in June 1999. Nicador Zelea Codreanu, a nephew of the fascist movement's inter-war leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (see Antisemitic legacy), said the new party would be called the National Union for Christian Rebirth since the authorities would not allow the movement to register under its old name. On the same day, a crowd of 'Guardists' gathered in a forest near Bucharest to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the assassination, on the orders of King Carol II, of Corneliu Codreanu.
On 10 May 1998 the Jewish cemetery in the Transylvanian town of Targu Mures (Jewish population fewer than 100, average age 68) was desecrated. Antisemitic graffiti was scrawled on the cemetery's walls.
On 22 June 1998 the JTA Daily News Bulletin reported that vandals had attacked an (unnamed) small Romanian town. A Jewish spokesperson was quoted as saying that fourteen candelabras had been stolen, and benches and window-panes broken. Four days later the JTA reported that police had arrested two teenagers in connection with the incident.
On 8 February 1999 vandals smashed several gravestones and hacked away at the walls of vaults in a Jewish cemetery in the city of Alba Iulia, 160 miles north-west of Bucharest. Police said the vandals were probably looking for buried treasure as it is believed that many Jews were buried during the Second World War with their jewels.
In 1998, against a background of frustration among intellectual and other circles regarding what many Romanian intellectuals see as an attempt to hinder the 'process of communism', Romania Literara's editor-in-chief, literary critic and chairman of the National Liberal Party's national council, Nicolae Manolescu, seconded by Dorin Tudoran, a former courageous anti-Ceausescu dissident, began engaging in polemics which reflected antisemitic positions of which they (and other Romania Literara collaborators) could hardly have been suspected in the past. The primary argument was that Jews desired a 'monopoly on suffering' and were therefore opposed to revelations of other crimes against humanity that could endanger that monopoly. One example of this attitude was said to be the case of the Holocaust-denier Roger Garaudy (see France) who, it was claimed, was persecuted for his opinions on Israel and whose right to 'freedom of expression' was thus allegedly denied. This provided Tudoran and others with an opportunity to attribute all the evils of the cultural policies pursued under the Communists to Jews alone.
On 7 September 1998 the weekly tabloid Atac la persoana published an article entitled 'Swastika'. The article said there were too many 'potential soap' people 'from Tel Aviv' on Bucharest's streets and deplored the fact that, due to its present economic 'penury', Romania did not have 'sufficient barbed wire and Zyklon-B gas' to provide a solution to this problem. In an editorial in the paper Evenimentul zilei the prominent columnist Cornel Nistorescu called on the authorities to take legal action against the tabloid (see Legal matters).
On 9 September 1998 the government said legal action should be initiated against the publishers of the weekly Atac la persoana in connection with the antisemitic article it had published two days earlier (see Publications and media). On the same day Justice Minister Valeriu Stoica asked the prosecutor-general to prosecute the publishers and identify the author of the article. Stoica said the article constituted 'nationalist-chauvinistic propaganda', which was punishable under the provisions of the penal code.
On 27 June 1998 the authorities in the Transylvanian town of Cluj unveiled a plaque commemorating 18,000 local Jews who were deported to the Auschwitz death camp in May-June 1944. There are 450 Jews in Cluj now among a population of half a million. The event was attended by, among others, representatives of the local council.
On 8 December 1998, in a speech to parliament marking Constitution Day, President Constantinescu sharply criticized extremist parties and their leaders, saying the threat of a 'renewal of dictatorship and [racial] discrimination' was 'inadmissable'. Alluding to recent statements by the PRM, he denounced threats of 'twenty-four-hour justice performed in stadiums' and the 'liquidation of political parties'.
On 5 January 1999 the Romanian government introduced the
mandatory study of the Holocaust in schools and universities to remind youth
of, in the words of an education ministry official, the 'savagery of the
modern world'. The ministry said students from primary school to university
would have to study the Holocaust as part of general history or more specific
courses on history, literature, art and psychology. Romanian teachers would
undergo special training in Israel to teach the courses. Professors at the
Centre of Historical Studies of the Jewish Community in Romania said the
ministry decision would 'illuminate the last five decades of dark Communism'.
© JPR 1999
