Prime Minister Petre Roman of Romania has promised the country’s chief rabbi, Moses Rosen, that his government will swiftly punish anyone responsible for anti-Semitic acts.
Rosen called on the prime minister, who has Jewish ancestry, to complain of recent anti-Semitic incidents and several anti-Jewish articles in the local press.
Jewish sources told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after the March 8 meeting that the chief rabbi has confidence in the new government and is now “fully reassured” of its determination to prevent anti-Semitic incidents.
Rosen also met with Foreign Minister Sergiu Celac and the minister for religious affairs, Nicolai Stroicescu. In addition, he conferred with the U.S. ambassador to Bucharest, Allan Green.
The chief rabbi lashed out against anti-Jewish hatred in an open letter to anti-Semites published Saturday in the Romanian newspaper Adevarul, a translation of which was provided in New York by the World Jewish Congress.
“Almost half a century since the beginning of our Holocaust,” the rabbi wrote, “here you are, raising your heads once more. The Nazi terminology reappears (‘Heil Hitler’); the instigations against us start again.”
“It is difficult, very difficult to try to dispel the lies spread against us,” the rabbi wrote. “What shall we do? Cry out that we ‘do not drink the blood of Christians,’ that we ‘do not poison the wells,’ that ‘the Moscow Jewish doctors did not poison the Soviet leaders’?”
“We have been here for 600 years and are not at all ashamed of our contribution to the welfare of this homeland,” Rosen wrote. But he also noted that since World War II, some 400,000 Romanian Jews have immigrated to Israel and that only 20,000 Jews remain, mainly those too old to leave.
“What else do you want, Messrs. Anti-Semites? The Yids have gone to Palestine,” he wrote. “You want to speed up the process, don’t you? What harm does it cause you if we, the remnants of Israel, wait for our graves to be here, next to those of our parents and forefathers?”
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.
