Declaring the minorities treaty inapplicable to Jews, Rumania today warned that if they wished to consider themselves a national minority they would have to “suffer the consequences.”
Foreign Minister Istrate Micescu, in an interview with the Journal de Geneva, liberal democratic daily, deplored the “grave error” committed by the Jews in identifying themselves with the Hungarian and German national minorities of the provinces annexed by Rumania after the war.
“We have never regarded the Jews as a national minority,” he said. “If, however, the Jews wish to separate themselves from the nation which has given them a home, they will have to suffer the consequences of such a step.”
Micescu said the Government drew a line between those Jews who had lived in Rumania a long time and recent immigrants. He warned the native Jews that if they identified themselves with their immigrant co-religionists, they could not complain if the Government treated them accordingly.
Serving notice on League of Nations powers that the Rumanian Government regarded the minorities treaty as applicable only to the Hungarians and Germans of the annexed provinces, Micescu said “the great powers have no right to demand of Rumania that she apply the statutes which they refuse to apply in their own countries.”
The Rumanian Government does not wish to raise the Jewish question before the League, but if the question is raised by others, Rumania is ready to give her reply, the Foreign Minister said.
Rumania will propose at the forthcoming Council session that an international commission be sent to determine the number of Jews who entered the country illegally, the usually well informed Journal des Nations reported.
Micescu will make the suggestion, the newspaper said, to convince world public opinion that the Rumanian Government’s intentions regarding the Jews are justified, since Government officials claim the majority of the Jews in Rumania entered illegally.
A committee of three, comprising the president of this Council session and two other members, has been appointed, it was learned, to decide whether petitions of the World Jewish Congress and the Alliance Israelite Universelle asking intervention in behalf of the Rumanian Jews should be considered at this session.
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