- The Ransom of the Jews: The Story of the Extraordinary Secret Bargain Between Romania and Israel
"The Communist regime in Romania succeeded where both the Iron Guards and Ion Antonescu had failed—in making Romania a country free of Jews." So writes Radu Ioanid, keeping in mind the insightful thought of his father, Virgil. Actually, these words epitomize the post-1945 story of the Romanian Jews who had escaped the genocidal policies of the Antonescu regime (1940–1944) and were subsequently sold to Israel by Romania's Communist dictators, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceausescu.
The Ransom of the Jews recounts the intricate and astonishing story of the secret operation that permitted the Israeli government to save numerous Romanian Jews in the period from 1948 to 1989 in exchange for hard currency paid to the Romanian authorities. At the end of World War II, the surviving Jewish population in Romania amounted to approximately 350,000 people, the largest Jewish community in all of Europe except for the Soviet Union. Based on documents and first-hand accounts by participants in the secret negotiations (e.g., Shaike Dan and Shlomo Leibovici-Lais), Ioanid's book demonstrates that the Romanian government treated Jewish Romanians as an export commodity. A cynical calculus was involved in this respect: Because Romanian Jews represented an important source of immigrants to the newly established state of Israel, the Romanian regime decided to use this phenomenon as a significant source of income. Thus, as Elie Wiesel perceptively put it in his foreword to this book, the Communist regime in Romania transformed itself into "an extraordinary merchant of human beings during the postwar years" (p. xvi).
The book opens with a brief analysis of the Jewish question in Romania and the roots of Romanian anti-Semitism. The "history of Romanian anti-Semitism is long and sad," Ioanid soberly states (p. 6). As for the terrible story of the Holocaust in Romania—which Ioanid has addressed at length in his internationally acclaimed book The Holocaust in Romania: The Destruction of Jews and Gypsies Under the Antonescu Regime, 1940–1944 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000)—Ioanid provides here the essential elements enabling readers to grasp the tragic fate of Romanian Jews during World War II. According to Ioanid, "at least 270,000 Jews under Romanian jurisdiction died, either on the explicit orders of Romanian officials or as a consequence of their criminal barbarity" (p. 15).
The remainder of the book offers a fascinating reconstruction of the complicated operation that permitted the Israeli government to organize the emigration of a large [End Page 127] number of Romanian Jews to Israel. Ioanid emphasizes the difference between the policies pursued by each of Romania's Communist dictators—Gheorge Gheorghiu-Dej and Nicolae Ceauşescu—on the Jewish emigration question. Under Gheorghiu-Dej, a barter operation was initiated. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Israelis funded the construction of farms and food processing complexes in Romania in exchange for exit permits for Romanian Jews. According to Ioanid's findings, Romania exported the output of these agricultural complexes and obtained between up to $10 million a year, money that was kept in a secret account to which only the supreme leader, Gheorghiu-Dej, had access (p. 91).
The nature of the deal changed after Ceauşescu came to power in the wake of Gheorghiu-Dej's death in March 1965. Ceauşescu, unlike his predecessor, was out to obtain "cold dollars." Thus, as Ioanid argues, the barter that characterized the age of Gheorghiu-Dej shifted to a system of "modern foreign trade" under Ceauşescu, who ordered the Romanian intelligence service to deal directly with Israel's Mossad, thus avoiding mediators such as Henry Jacober, a Jewish businessman living in London. Jacober from the late 1950s was involved in secret dealings with Romanian intelligence officials to facilitate the emigration of Jews and non-Jews from Romania in exchange for a ransom of $4,000 to $6,000 per person, of which he received a...