Historically, modern Romania is the heir to five very different geographical and cultural areas: Walachia (north of the Danube and up to the Carpathian Mountains), Moldavia (north of the Danube Delta), Transylvania (northwest of the Carpathians), Bukovina (south of the Ukrainian border), the Banat (by the borders with Serbia and Hungary) and the Danube Delta. The differences between all of those continue to be felt in modern Romania. Logically, Jewish life in each of them has gone its own way.
To compound the patchwork even further, waves of invaders and settlers arrived at various times through the centuries. In the Middle Ages, Karaites (the heirs to the Crimean Khazars who adopted Judaism without being ethnically Jewish) came to the northern shores of the Black Sea coast. In the 14th centuries Ashkenazi refugees from Hungary settled in the Saxon towns of Transylvania. The Sephardis
came to Walachia in the 15th century, when the region became a vassal to the Ottoman sultan. Moldavia saw an influx of Jews from Poland.
Predictably, attitudes to the Jews varied in the various areas. The Jews in Transylvania sometimes enjoyed some freedoms, their brethren in Walachia were frequently friends to the local lords. When they were not they were subject to repressions. Perhaps the position of the Jews in Moldavia was the worst. The local non-Jews viewed them as a conduit of the sultan's policies (Moldavia was also vassal to the High Porte). The Cossack raids into the area sometimes resulted in violent pogroms.
At the end of the 18th century Walachia and Moldavia became the war theatre for several conflicts between the Russian and the Ottoman empires, resulting in antisemitic atrocities perpetrated by both sides.
In 1829 the Treaty of Adrianople delineated the border between Russia and the Ottoman Empire along the River Danube. In effect, Walachia and Moldavia became independent. There was a total of 22,000 Jews living in both of them. The numbers increased exponentially as thousands of Ashkenazi Jews fled to relative safety from the pogroms in tsarist Russia.
Templul Coral Synagogue in Bucharest
Whether to grant Jews equal rights as citizens was a controversial topic when Romania became a sovereign country, in 1859. As a result, there have been waves of Jewish emigrants out of Romania, just as there were frequent influxes of immigrants from Russia. At the turn of the century there were 250,000 Jews living in Romania, 3 percent of the total population. In Iași, the capital of Moldavia, more than one third of the population was Jewish.
Antisemitism gained momentum in the 1920s and 1930s and culminated when Romania joined the Second World War as a Nazi ally. The Romanian Jews were exposed to one of the most horrific – and least known – holocausts in Europe. Accounts vary, but it is estimated that 280,000-380,000 Romanian Jews were killed in various concentration camps including some in
Romania-proper. The atrocities committed by local nationalist organisations such as the Legion of the Archangel Michael and the Iron Guard were so outrageous that the Germans sent orders to the Romanians to stop and wait for the SS to come and do the job more "cleanly."
After the Second World War Romania became a hardline Communist country. About 115,000 of the remaining Jews left for Israel.
Great Synagogue of Constanța
Significantly, during the Communist period, Romania became the only Warsaw Pact country not to break diplomatic relations with Israel. In fact Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania's wayward dictator, devised a clever way to make hard currency on the Jews. In the course of 20 years he allowed Jews to emigrate against payment in US dollars.
When Communism collapsed, there were an estimated 23,000 Jews in Romania. Following the economic crises and the turbulence of the 1990s, the Jewish community in 2011 numbered just 3,000.
Not unlike Bulgaria, Romania started to review its role in the Second World War relatively late. In 2003-2004 the Wiesel Commission concluded that "no country, besides Germany, was involved in massacres of Jews on such a scale." In recent years, an increasing number of monuments and memorials has been erected throughout Romania to commemorate that fact.
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