The Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust by Ion Popa (review)

The Holocaust in Romania had its own distinctive features. It was carried out by a sovereign German ally, and the deaths resulted primarily from deportation and incarceration under inhuman conditions rather than from outright murder. Romania's wartime dictator, Marshal Ion Antonescu, acted on his own—albeit in a context of Nazi domination over continental Europe. His treatment of the Jews was ambivalent. For those of Bukovina and Bessarabia, whom he regarded as having Communist sympathies and suspected of disloyalty to Romania, he was a cruel antisemite, deporting the majority to camps in Transnistria. For those of Moldavia, Wallachia, and southern Transylvania, he has been described as "a providential anti-Semite" who saw them as "his own Jews." In summer 1942, Antonescu decided against German requests to deport the remaining Jews of Romania—from the Banat, Southern Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia—to German death camps. If, as in the German case, discrimination was followed by deportation, deportation in the Romanian case did not lead to the gas-chamber. Tens of thousands of Jews from Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transnistria were indeed shot from winter 1941 through early spring 1942 on Romanian orders in Golta county, but subsequently the plight of the Jews in Transnistria was characterized merely by degradation and callous neglect. Jews residing in Ukraine beyond Transnistria were likely to suffer a quick death by shooting at the hands of the Germans, but in Transnistria Jews often faced a slow death by typhus or starvation. The contrast between German and Romanian actions appears in the fact that the largest proportion of Jews to survive Axis rule in the occupied Soviet territories was in Transnistria. According to Radu Ioanid, "In 1930, Romania had been home to 756,000 Jews. At the end of World War II about 375,000 of them had survived."¹ Of the Jews living in pre-1940 Romania, more than 130,000 from Northern Transylvania, which had been annexed by Hungary in August 1940, had been deported and murdered in the death camps in German-occupied Poland.

Popa's study, an eloquent treatment of the dynamics between religion and politics in East-Central Europe in the period from World War II through the present, uniquely adds to the literature in English. It is especially valuable for our understanding of the Romanian Orthodox Church's endorsement of the antisemitism of the Romanian Legionary Movement (Iron Guard), of Ion Antonescu, and of the path to national communism followed by Nicolae Ceauşescu. Popa helps explain how a Church that openly opposed Communism in the interwar period survived an atheist regime, and conversely, how the Communist regime used religion to its political advantage. The author's discussion will be of interest to historians, social scientists, and theologians alike.

Popa begins by questioning the myths that senior clerics developed after World War II to cover up the Church's earlier support for the antisemitic policies of successive Romanian regimes. The dominant status of Romanian Orthodoxy appears in the adherence of between seventy to eighty percent of the population in the period from the 1930s to the present. Indeeed in 1938 the Romanian state and the Orthodox Church nearly became one with the appointment of Patriarch Miron Cristea as Prime Minister.

The World War II-era regimes were the royal dictatorship of King Carol II (1938–1940), the fascistic National Legionary State (of the Iron Guard and General Ion Antonescu, September 1940–January 1941), and the military dictatorship of Antonescu himself (1941–1944). Under them, the Church promoted antisemitic discourses that portrayed Jews as "Satan's soldiers," "sons of the devil," and "depraved profiteers," and legitimized Romania's part in Operation Barbarossa, launched by Hitler against the Soviet Union in June 1941. Popa analyses the Orthodox Church's relationship with the postwar Jewish community of Romania, with Judaism as a religion, and with the state of Israel, linking all to the degree to which the Church recognizes or not its part in the...