Setting a contrast to the current streak of anti-Semitism in this country’s press, Ion Iliescu last week became the first Romanian president to participate in the Jewish community’s annual Holocaust commemoration.
Attending ceremonies at Bucharest’s Choral Temple, Iliescu also became the first Romanian head of state to enter a Romanian synagogue in an official capacity.
Nor was his attendance at the Holocaust memorial service the only gesture Iliescu has made to the Jewish community recently.
On Passover he gave a special address to Romanian Jews.
And late last week he was in Washington to attend the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
When he attended the commemoration in Bucharest, Iliescu also brought with him several high-level government officials, including the ministers of health and finance, the newly appointed attorney general and members of Parliament.
At the ceremony, the Romanian president spoke of his own recollections, when “as a young man, I was an eyewitness to the tragedy undergone by the Jewish people during World War II.”
He acknowledged that this occupied a “special place” within “the inconceivable sufferings and atrocities inflicted by blind hatred.”
The president said Romania’s new constitution “guarantees the equality of all citizens, regardless of race, nationality, religion, ethnicity, language, sex, opinions, wealth, social origin.”
And he ended with a promise: “We assure the Jewish population that we shall energetically oppose the manifestations of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, defending, with the means of the democratic state, the honor of all citizens regardless of their religion or ethnicity.
“Let us hope that this will not remain only a promise made but will also become a promise kept,” he said.
Ironically, Iliescu’s welcome gestures have come about amid a continuing current of anti-Semitic articles in the press.
SLURS AGAINST THE CHIEF RABBI
In fact, the president’s participation in the commemoration has come under criticism.
Right-wing nationalists called the gesture “a betrayal of the religion of his forefathers,” a “recognition of the culpability of the Romanian people” in crimes against the Jews and “the price Romania has to pay for getting most-favored-nation status” with the United States.
This was a reference to Romania’s request that the United States lift trade restrictions imposed on the country during the hard-line regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.
The weekly publication Politica warned the president that “his desire of pleasing a few thousand Jews might dangerously estrange him from the Romanian people” and reminded him that he won the elections with the support of certain nationalist circles.
Moses Rosen, Romania’s chief rabbi, welcomed Iliescu to last week’s ceremony, but noted in his address the recent appearance of anti-Semitism.
“The fascist persecutions, too, started with books and magazines that people apparently did not pay much attention to,” Rosen warned.
Rosen has personally come under attack in the local press.
An editorial in the weekly Europa warned that Iliescu’s visit to Washington during the Romanian Orthodox observance of Easter, “when all kinds of dissidents might be in the country, must have been plotted by Moses Rosen to make easier a coup d’etat.”
Another article in the same right-wing publication was titled “The Rabbi Suffers From Hemorrhoids.” It denigrated Rosen as “the devil in mauve” (he wears purple religious vestments), “the old goat” and “inventor of the pogroms and Holocausts carried out by the Romanians.”
But the article’s author, Ilie Neascu, who is the editor of the newspaper, went beyond the traditional content of a lampoon.
He not only ridiculed the character or personal appearance of a person, but slandered Jews throughout the world:
“The Western press is almost entirely in the hands of the Jews, as is the Council of Europe, led by their (Free)masonry and the United Nations Organization at the mercy of the World Jewish Congress,” Neascu wrote.
He added the oft-heard calumny that “communism was founded by the Jews.”
PRESIDENT’S SINCERITY QUESTIONED
Iliescu’s sincerity about combatting this type of anti-Semitism has been questioned by many here, including Rabbi Rosen, despite the president’s recent gestures.
Some leaders of liberal opposition parties said they declined invitations to attend the Holocaust memorial precisely because they objected to Iliescu’s presence.
One telegram to Rosen read that the opposition could not take part in a ceremony commemorating the victims of fascism next to “somebody who, for inexcusable reasons, accepts political support from, and returns support to, the very forces whose program means nothing but a permanent incitement to hatred.”
And a representative of the Liberal Party said the participation of the opposition beside the president “would have meant implicit approval of his moral and political duplicity.
“For, although openly supporting the extremist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic parties, he tries, through such maneuvers as this ceremony, to elude reality and portray abroad the false image of a democratic president.”
Jewish figures also questioned Iliescu.
Radu Alexandru, writer and vice president of the Romania-Israel Association, sent an open letter to the president in which he wrote:
“I am obliged to tell you with the most sincere regrets that, as long as you, for political reasons, continue to accept this disqualifying complicity, I do not acknowledge your moral right to walk into the Choral Temple on Holocaust Day.”
Rosen charged that Iliescu “has done nothing to stop” anti-Semites. “He has not asked for concrete steps in this respect.”
Despite all the criticism, it is also understood here that Iliescu is constrained by having to rely on several of the nationalist factions in Parliament.
Jewish leaders here say it remains to be seen how the president will follow up on the unusual gestures he has made in the past month.
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.
