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Conclusion
- Wayne State University Press
- Chapter
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149 Conclusion Adrian Radu-Cernea (Zwieback) was one of only five Jews admitted to the University of Iaşi for the 1939 fall term, and he was one of the few Jews who not only escaped from the chestură courtyard when the shooting began but was not recaptured and returned to the ongoing massacre. On “That Sunday” he and his father were among those rounded up and driven to the police station where they managed, keeping close together, to get safely into the courtyard through the gauntlet of club-wielding soldiers at the gate. Inside they were separated, about the time the shooting began. In the first moments of that horror the son scrambled over the courtyard wall and made his way safely home. There, provisioned by his mother, he hid himself in the wreckage of a bathroom damaged during one of the Soviet bombings. On the evening of his second day in hiding, Tuesday, July 1, his mother brought him news about the neighbors. Their grocer Mr. Leibovici and his whole family had been shot to death, their doctor had also been murdered, and Mr. Olivenbaum had been killed and placed in the window of his hat store with a machine gun in his arms—“evidence” that Jews had shot at troops in the city. Newspapers the next two days included official communiqués from Ion Antonescu: first, that “500 Judeo-communists” had been executed in Iaşi for firing on German and Romanian soldiers, and second, that for each repetition of such acts fifty Judeo-communists would be executed. Writing about these events years later, Adrian describes having been stunned by what was happening: “I said to myself: ‘Why must we remain in these cursed places, poisoned by this primitive antisemitism, by so much grief for so long?’”1 The poisoning began when early Christians alleged that Adrian’s ancient 150 C O N C L U S I O N ancestors had murdered Jesus and were the offspring of Satan. Among many later allegations, one especially had horrific consequences—that Jews killed Christian children for their blood to be used in the making of Passover bread. In the late nineteenth century this largely Christian mythology was supplemented or replaced by pseudo-scholars who gave Jew hatred a name (antisemitism) and offered, as scientific fact, that Jews were a race apart. While the new “science” certainly reached Romania, Jew hatred there continued to be driven mainly by the old Christian myths and the particular circumstances of the country’s own history. At the very outset of that history, in the struggle for an independent and unified country, a new crime was added to the ancient and medieval list, namely, the effort of Romanian Jews to become citizens of the emerging state. At first citizenship seemed within reach because a number of Romanian leaders, seeking wide support in 1848 for their national aims, called for the political emancipation of Jews. However, when independence was about to be achieved in the 1860s and a national constitution had to be written, the question of Jewish citizenship presented itself unequivocally. Lawmakers, even some who had earlier called for the Jews’ emancipation, said no: no to the appeals of resident Jews, to international Jewry, and to other governments . And though the constitution was revised in 1879 to admit Romanian Jews to citizenship, a demand made by European powers at the Congress of Berlin, the policy remained unchanged, bureaucratic hurdles being raised to effectively deny what the revised law required. Finally, in the aftermath of World War I, the Romanian government bowed to international pressure, sweetened by a gift of territory that doubled the country’s size and population , and granted citizenship. Christian university students led the widespread and clamorous opposition against citizenship. They called for numerus clausus or numerus nullus, restricting the number of Jewish students in, or eliminating them altogether from, public schools. Out of the student movement grew a broader campaign against Jewish inclusion. Jews were to be removed from, or be given a greatly diminished role in, the political, economic, and cultural life of the country. Some on the right saw removal from the country, a statewide application of numerus nullus, as the logical solution to the “Jewish Question.” The antisemitic right rode this issue for all it was worth. Fascist militiamen wearing uniforms adorned with swastikas terrorized Jews with impunity. Most successful were members of the Legion of the Archangel Michael...