The Supreme Court today upheld the constitutionality of the Citizenship Revision Law of 1938, under which a total of 225,222 Jews have been deprived of Rumanian citizenship.
Rejecting the appeal of a Jew who had been denationalized under the law, the Court ruled that neither the 1938 measure nor any other Rumanian legislation contradicted the Constitutional guarantee of equality of rights.
The appellant had contended that the 1938 law, enacted in the short lived anti-Semitic Goga regime and later confirmed by Royal Decree, was incompatible with Article 5 of the Constitution which stipulates that ethnical origin or religious belief must not be an impediment in obtaining civic and political rights in the re-united Rumania.
(The revision law was declared to violate the League-guaranteed minorities treaties and the issue was taken to Geneva. The Rumanian Government, however, refused to retreat from its position, holding that Jews were not covered by the 1919 treaty, and a Committee of Three was formed by the League Council to study the question, but no conclusive action was taken.
(Severe measures have been taken against denationalized Jews, who have been placed in the category of aliens, restricted in the right to work and practice professions. Recently they were subjected to a special tax.)
The newspaper Curentul reported today that appeals courts in Sibiu, Chisinau (Kishineff) and Cernauti have unanimously rejected actions brought by Rumanian Jews on the grounds that they had been deprived of their civic rights through the enforcement of anti-Jewish legislation enacted by the Goga regime.
Meanwhile, Chief Rabbi Senator Alexander Safran has introduced in the Senate a number of amendments to a bill providing that only holders of special authorization certificates may be admitted to medical practice.
The amendments, Dr. Safran said, were designed to prevent unjust application of the projected law, under which a Central Chamber of Doctors is to be set up.
One of the proposed amendments urged that no organ of the Medical Association be given the power to suspend or declare invalid authorizations unless a member had been definitely excluded from the profession. Dr. Safran also demanded that no suspension or exclusion should become effective unless it had been confirmed by the Supreme Court.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
