The Jewish population of Rumania which numbered 750,000 people before the outbreak of the war, including more than 100,000 now in the section of Transylvania annexed by Hungary, has been reduced to about 300,000, the Swedish newspaper Aftontiaingen reports today.
Quoting a prominent Rumanian political leader whose name is not given, the paper says that “at least 126,000 Jews have been murdered in Rumania since the Rumanian government joined the Axis. In addition, 60,000 Rumanian Jews are now in the labor camps in Transnistria where mortality is great because of starvation, mistreatment and lack of sanitary facilities.
The article says that according to the latest Rumanian census, taken in May 1942, there were 272,409 Jews in Old Rumania as compared with 340,000 in the pre-war period. In Bukovina there were only 34,000 Jews left at the time of the census as compared with about 100,000 Jews who lived there before the outbreak of the war. No Jews were left in Bessarabia, where more than 200,000 Jews resided prior to Rumania’s joining the Nazis. Many Jews in these two provinces were massacred, others were deported to Transnistria and some fled into Russia.
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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.
