The Museum of the Jews from Romania

The 21st January 1941, a rebellion of the legionaries of Romania broke out, lasting for some three days. At that moment, a pogrom against the Jews has been started. Soldiers have been burned, citizens mistreated, and much more happened in the streets of and in the woods around Bucharest. The nightmare lasted for some 60 hours. Of the 236 people who died then, 118 were Jews.

The Jewish Museum in Bucharest has been organised in a synagogue as soon as 1978. It is located in the old Jewish quarter of the city, downtown in Bucharest. Here, some 60 years ago, this was the place where much of the commerce of the town took place. Now the area is enclosed by a circle of blocs of flats, built during communist rule. It is hoped, however, that this part of the city will shortly rise again.

In the very centre of the museum, there is a statue of the holocaust, a symbol of the dead of all pogroms. The statue has no head and it is hollow inside. To it lead a so-called “Road of the death”, on which one can recognise foot-prints. All prints seem to lead only one way, in the direction of the holocaust; as there is no return from death. The visitors get to know, that two former Auschwitz prisoners have been asked to walk bare-feet the symbolic road to the death. In front of the statue there are six light bulbs switched on, for the six million dead of the holocausts.

Except the frightening statue, there are in the museum various objects to show the history of the Jews on Romanian grounds. There are reasons to think that the first Jews arrived in this area shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem. In the Roman Army, that conquered Dacia, the ancient country that covered the area of today’s Romania, under the emperor Trajanus, there should have been a Jewish corpus too.

Fact is, that the doctors at the princiary courts were Jews, especially in Moldova. Between the 15th and the 18th century, there are plenty of documents attesting the presence of Jewish doctors at the courts of Stefan the Great, Vasile Lupu and Nicolae Mavrocordat. Even in the army of Mihai Viteazu, who succeeded around 1600 to unite the Romanian principalities the first time after the Roman period, there were Jewish soldiers. Many cities have been made by Jews, especially in Moldova, Jew, who have been brought from other countries by the rulers or by the nobility, to get the economy in a better state. Despite of this, the Jews did not get any political rights in the Romanian Principalities; even though they got commercial privileges, they were not recognised as citizens. The revolution at 1848 wanted to give all the inhabitants of Romania the right to claim citizenship. 1877-1878, some 4000 Jews were fighting alongside Romanians in the Independence War of the country. After the victory, they have been made Romanian citizens. As late as 1918, all inhabitants of the country have been given the right to Romanian citizenship, a time, when the Romanian national state has been founded. Since, very little time has elapsed. Quite understandably, not everyone agreed to this right of citizenship given to “foreigners”. So it comes, that right afterwards the legionaries, the Iron Guard has been formed. It followed the rebellion of the legionaries and the communist regime that suppressed the scandal, without bringing it to an end. That was the issue of a free and democratic Romanian society that has been built after the downturn of communism in 1989. To a greater extent, we may say, that has been solved.

Bucharest still hosts an Iddish Theatre, that still performs both in Iddish and in Romanian. Translations of the plays performed here are available, both into Romanian and other languages.

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