Exclusion of the Jews from the Front of National Rebirth, sole Rumanian party, and the principle and manner of execution of the Citizenship Revision Law were cited by Dr. Wilhelm Filderman in an address before the Congress of Jewish Communities as the two main grievances of Rumanian Jewry. Full text of the address is published in the Curierul Israelit, official organ of the Jewish community.
Discussing the Front in relation to the legal and political status of Rumanian Jewry, Dr. Filderman pointed out that its doors were still barred to Jews despite the fact that minorities groups were invited to membership.
“We are neither members of the majority of the nation,” he caustically remarked, “nor of the minority. It seems that we are so highly regarded that pending a decision as to what we really are–whether we belong to the majority or form an independent national minority–we are nothing at all.”
Dr. Filderman condemned the Citizenship Revision Law, under which more than 225,000 Jews were disenfranchised, because it had “created crying injustices by its careless drafting, the shortness of time allowed for presentation of documents, the prohibitive expense involved in procuring documents and its subsequent application.”
Dr. Filderman pointed out that war veterans, war widows and orphans were among those whose application for confirmation of citizenship had been rejected. He described also the tragic plight of Jews who, after being disenfranchised, were deprived of their right to work.
Jewish firms of long standing, he said, had been struck off the register. Many Jews, including veterans, widows and orphans of Jews who fell on the battlefield, were deprived of the right to work which their fathers had enjoyed even before being granted citizenship.
Dr. Filderman called attention to the fact that a special tax had been imposed upon the disenfranchised Jews and that this tax had to be paid by every affected shopkeeper and factory owner irrespective of whether he employed 1,000 or 20 men, or whether his enterprise was located in the center of the outskirts of the city. Jews unable to pay the tax, he emphasized, were liable to confinement in certain districts.
“I hope that the ministers of National Defense and the Interior,” Dr. Filderman said, “will exempt at least those doing active military service as well as ex-servicemen war widows and orphans from payment of the aliens tax.”
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.
