Pogroms, the Holocaust and emigration have reduced Bucharest's once 70,000-strong Jewish population to around 3,500 today. Nevertheless, the Jewish community in the Romanian capital is vibrant and dynamic, and has an excellent cultural centre, three working synagogues, a school and a superb theatre.

 

A Brief History of Jews in Romania


There was another wave of Jewish immigration in 1903-5 following the Chisinau Pogrom of April 1903 (Chisinau was at the time part of the Russian Empire), and while the plight of the Jews improved considerably as their numbers and political influence grew, it was only in the aftermath of World War I that Romanian Jews were awarded full civil rights, later guaranteed in the 1923 Romanian Constitution. It was during the 1920s that the number of Jews living in Romania reached its peak (at around 730,000), around a third of whom lived in Bessarabia (today the Republic of Moldova). Bucharest’s Jewish population peaked at around 70,000 in 1930: as much as ten per cent of the city’s population.

Romania was not, however, immune to the anti-Semitism of 1930s Europe, and the rise in popularity of the fascist scum Legionnaire Movement and its horrific paramilitary wing, the Iron Guard, can in part be explained by its violently anti-Semitic policies. By the time the Iron Guard joined the government of military leader Ion Antonescu and formed its Legionary State in September 1940, much anti-Semitic legislation had already been passed, and the Legionnaires were allowed to persecute Jews with impunity. This persecution intensified, becoming violent in the horrific three-day Bucharest Pogrom of January 21-23 during which the Legionnaires killed - in the most horrific manner possible - 125 Jews; women and children included. Thousands more were beaten and tortured, and two synagogues were destroyed. And worse was to come: in July 1941 as many as 13,000 Jews were killed in Iasi, in one of the worst pogroms in Jewish history. Mass killings and deportations followed, and, according to the Wiesel Commission report, released by the Romanian government in 2004, Romania in total killed 280,000 to 380,000 Jews during World War II. At the same time, 120,000 of Transylvania's 150,000 Jews died at the hands of Hungary’s fascist government (writer Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who was chairman of the Wiesel Commission, was deported with his family from Sighet to Auschwitz by the Hungarian regime). And while as many as 350,000 Romanian Jews survived the war, the Wiesel Commission states that ‘of all the allies of Nazi Germany, Romania was responsible for the deaths of more Jews than any country other than Germany itself.’