Jewish leaders in Bucharest were recently summoned to appear before the authorities and were told that they must deliver to the Government the sum of 4,000,000,000 lei – approximately $28,000,000 at the last quoted rate of exchange – by September 1, 1943.
Reporting this new levy today, the Nazi Transocean news agency stated that unless the Jews deliver the total sum by the designated date, there will be a new mass-deportation of Jews from Rumania to Transnistria where tens of thousands of deported Jews have perished.
The ultimatum to the Jewish leaders was delivered in the offices of the Commissariate for Jewish Affairs in Bucharest. Radu Lecca, the Rumanian commissar in charge of Jewish questions, said that the Jews must raise the 4,000,000,000 lei among themselves by taxing every Jewish man and woman “and even half-Aryans.” Those who refuse to pay will be sent, together with their families, to Transnistrian territory, he added.
240,000 RUMANIAN JEWS UNDER THREAT OF DEPORTATION
The approximately 240,000 Jews still living in Rumania are constantly threatened with deportation to “unknown destinations” as an “economically inactive element,” another report reaching here today stated. Since the Jews are deprived of the right to work, the Rumanian authorities claim that they must be “evacuated” from the cities where they live in order to make the protection of these cities from air raids more effective.
Only about 11,000 Jews in the whole of Rumania have been classified as “economically useful,” the report revealed. These are mostly engineers and specialists indispensable to Rumania’s economy and they are in no danger of being deported
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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.
