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After World War II, three main factors shaped Jewish life in Communist Romania. The first and most important factor was the trauma of the Holocaust, during which half of the Jewish population (more than 350,000 persons) was killed in the massacres instituted both by the regime of Ion Antonescu, for the territory under Romanian administration, and by the pro-Nazi government of Szalasi, for Northern Transylvania under Hungarian occupation. The survivors have been physically and emotionally scarred for the rest of their lives.
The second factor shaping Jewish life in Communist Romania was the establishment of the State of Israel. In the shadow of the Holocaust, Israel exerted a powerful attraction despite its complexity, financial hardships and security concerns.
A third factor the postwar social and political changes in Romania. With the population's poverty and as a result of the war, the situation of the Jewish population had worsened, aggravated by the ravages of the Holocaust, as well as by Romanian's state policy to delay restitution of houses and property belonging to Jews. Nationalization and the economic crisis were a severe blow to Jewry's many businessmen and free professionals, and to craft and trade workers who were left in the street. The new regime also stripped the organized community of its historical content and disempowered it educationally, culturally and socially, replacing its leaders with Jewish Communists detached from the Jewish world.
Given this reality, virtually almost the entire Jewish population of Romania immigrated to Israel. As far as the issue of emigration is concerned, the Communist authorities had an ambiguous position: on the one hand, the departure of Romanian citizens from the "Communist paradise" was a moral defeat which led to an violent propaganda against aliyah. On the other hand, the Communists aimed to "Romanianize" society, and therefore encouraged Jewish emigration. In the period of 1948-1952, about 120,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, about a third of the Jewish population in Romania.
Despite the party line of internationalism, equal rights, and "brotherhood between the Romanian people and the national minorities," the national question - including anti-Semitism - was a constant subject of party discussions. The extent and expression of anti-Semitism varied over time. For example the anti-Zionist, anti-cosmopolitan crusade began in the late 1940s peaking in 1952-1953.
In October 1948 the Politburo of the Romanian Communist party twice discussed the Jewish problem. First, it decided to close Jewish schools and hospitals, and in March 1948 it outlawed the activity of JDC,ORT and OSE organizations. In 1949, Romanian Communists began a brutal campaign against the Zionists. Zionist organizations were banned, and hundreds of Zionist activists were arrested and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. Over the course of the next ten years, some 250 Zionist leaders and militants were arrested, and tried by military courts.
At the same time, the new Communist regime brought about a radical change, unprecedented in the history of the Jews in Romania: a significant number of Jews became prominent in the political and administrative hierarchy of the new regime, among them, the long time Communist militant Ana Pauker, and hard line Stalinists such as Iosif Chişinevski and Leonte Răutu. Still, Party leaders sought to implement a “Romanianization” of the higher ranks, and Ana Pauker's overthrow in 1952 was prepared based on an investigation with many anti-Semitic features.
Stalin's death in 1953 did nothing to diminish Romania's anti-Semitic policies. Jewish emigration continued to be banned, more Zionists were arrested and tried. In March 1954, a trial of Zionists began, and in July a Romanian court condemned more than a hundred Jews for espionage. The most important of these, "the trial of the 13" targeted a number of important Jewish Zionists leaders headed by A.L Zissu and Mişu Benvenisti. In April 1954 two hundred were imprisoned, their sentences ranging from fifteen years to life.
The periods of time when emigration was stopped almost entirely, between 1952 and 1956, were marked by violent anti- Zionist campaigns, supported by the new pro-Communist Jewish organization known as the Jewish Democratic Committee (CDE). The Jewish press of the 1950s came under ideological control of the regime, mainly though Unirea (The Union) newspaper, which was used as a tool for anti-Zionist campaigns. Intellectuals and artists who followed Communist ideology were promoted and granted privileged by the regime.
In the mid 1960s, relations between Israel and Romania evolved favorably. A significant moment saw the upgrading of diplomatic representations to the embassy level in 1969, marking an obvious contrast to the deterioration of Israel's relations with the Soviet bloc after the Israeli-Arab war of 1967. Since then, commercial, tourist and cultural links between the two countries were permanently strengthened.
Rabbi Moses Rosen, who had become chief rabbi in 1948, and the leader of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania (FCER) in 1964, was the right leader for this era. Initially, the administration saw him as a loyal administrator, but he gradually attained some autonomy. Exploiting the party's interest in improving Romania's image in the West, he succeeded in establishing an acceptable community life even within the Communist regime and the threat of the declining number of Jews.
Under Rosen's leadership, the community operated a network of Talmud Torah schools, kosher restaurants, and a Jewish journal - outstanding achievements in the 1950s. A Yiddish theater was opened in Bucharest in 1948, and one in Iaşi. Jewish religious institutions were allowed to pursue their activity. In1960 there were officially 153 communities with 841 synagogues, 67 ritual baths, 86 kosher slaughterhouses, and a matzo factory.
A significant change occurred in the 1960s, under Nicolae Ceauşescu’s leadership. Essentially xenophobic and anti-Semitic, Ceauşescu’s national ideology regarded Jewish emigration as the most convenient way to “improve” the ethnic structure of the population and to insure that ethnic Romanians held positions of authority. Although he maintained good relations with the state of Israel, he also allowed, and sometimes encouraged attacks upon Jews in the party-controlled press. However, in Ceauşescu’s era (1965-1989), Rosen managed, with the support of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, to maintain functioning institutions, such as kosher restaurants, homes for the elderly, Talmud Torah schools, youth choirs with a Hebrew and Yiddish repertoire, and the organization of seminars on Jewish topics.
In 1956 Rosen began to issue Revista cultului mozaic (The Periodical of the Mosaic Religion), and in 1978 a museum for the history of the Jews of Romania was established, along with a center for documentation and research. Many significant historical papers and documents were published, edited by historians like Itzik Schwartz-Kara, Lya Benjamin and Victor Eskenasy.
Annual celebrations of Hanukkah and Passover organized in communities throughout the country and with the participations of delegations from Western European and American Jewish communities, were important occasions to strengthen the Jewish identity, but also served the propagandistic interests of the regime. Rosen was also involved in organizing massive Jewish emigration from Romania, and beginning in the mid-1960s, he developed diplomatic and other ties between Israel and Romania.
From the 1960s, an increasingly accelerated process was set of to "nationalize" party and state bodies by removing Jews from positions of leadership, as well as from the military hierarchy and the Securitate (political police). At the same time, a significant number of Jewish intellectuals were able to pursue their work, some of them becoming prominent in the fields of science and culture. In the humanities, the linguist Alexandru Graur, Jacques Byck, Iancu Fisher, Henri Wald, and Salomon Marcus. and the literary historian Paul Cornea acquired a remarkable renown.
Liviu Rotman, Toldot ha-yehudim be-Romanyah, vol. 5, Hatkufa Hacomunistit ad1965, Tel Aviv, 2005 (Hebrew)
