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February 25, 2011

Jewish community renewal

A return trip to Romania proves to be healing and fascinating.
JACK CHIVO

A few months ago, as I was about to land in Bucharest, I turned to my wife and wondered aloud, “What am I doing here? Why did I break my promise not to return to Romania?”

Some 46 years earlier, on an Austrian plane taking me to freedom from the communist country, I made a promise, which I intended to keep. Although Romania is my birthplace, there we had been persecuted, robbed, pushed into indignity and treated as second-class people, solely because we were Jewish.

I would argue that Romanian Jews were the original refusniks. Since the mid-1950s, years before the Soviet Jews were persecuted for the “crime” of requesting to leave the country, the about a half million of us in Romania still alive after the Holocaust had to endure horrendous abuses, removed from our jobs, kicked out of universities, prevented from publishing books, scientific papers, teaching or doing academic research. Those approved for emigration had to be “ransomed” by the Israeli government or relatives abroad, with “fees” ranging from a few thousand dollars up to five-digit payments.

I wasn’t spared, and I had to work for five years on construction sites, notwithstanding my academic credentials, first as a laborer and then as a worksite clerk, while my brother, a brilliant engineer – later one of the world’s best in his field, helping design buildings around the world – was earning a living by driving a concrete truck, and only permitted to do so on the night shifts.

Even the last days before we left were marked by harassment and persecution. Unlike Jews from other communist countries, who were allowed to sell their homes and bring with them their belongings, Romanian authorities gave us permission to leave with a single piece of luggage, not exceeding 20 kilograms per person, and we were forced to give away our homes to the government, even to sign a legal form in which we thanked the socialist country for accepting our “gift.”

To add insult to injury, a commission was dispatched to check the homes before accepting our “donation,” allegedly to make sure that they were up to “socialist” standards. In my family’s case, they requested that we remove the beautiful hardwood floors installed before the communist takeover and replace them with grey linoleum, the same with the expensive wallpaper, which was to be covered with white paint. We were lucky, in a strange way, because a high-ranking police officer was eyeing the house and liked it the way it was and, through his intervention, we didn’t have to go through major renovations.

And I was going back there in 2010!

A long Jewish history

The history of Jews in Romania extends some 2,000 years, at least since the Roman wars of 101-106 CE and the invasion of the lands from the Danube and over the Carpathian mountains. During that time, Jews constituted about 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire, numbering six to seven million, and there were Jewish soldiers and Jewish units in the legions that conquered the ancient kingdom of Dacia, as proven by the Hebrew gravestones found there and the writings of contemporary historians.

After the Roman conquest, the legions settled there and began mixing with the local population, the starting point of a new people – Romanians. More than two centuries later, under pressure from the nomadic German tribes coming from Asia, Roman officials left the land, but many Romans stayed behind and mixed with the waves of conquerors on their way to dominate the European continent.

What happened to the Jews nobody knows for sure, but there are signs that some kept their identity, as suggested by the existence of some places with the name Jidov, a local word for Jews, including the very old Jidov cemetery and the Jidov mountain peak in Transylvania. Some Romanian historians argue that the origin of the medieval town of Jidvei, also in Transylvania, established more than 700 years ago, but with even earlier roots, known for more than a millennia for its famous wineries, is related to the name Jude (Jew in German), often pronounced Jid.

By 1550, there was already a small Sephardi community in Bucharest, a city established only 90 years earlier. I can only trace my ancestors from my father’s side to the end of the 18th century, when there is mention in a document from the city from where my father’s family came of a person called Chiva, the same name as my father and grandfather, which is the Romanian version of the ancient Hebrew name Akiva, with the added Romanian words, Jidov-proprietar (Jew-owner). We do not know for sure what our ancestor owned, but the family was in the wine and transportation business for centuries.

In the 19th century, Jews started increasing in numbers and becoming an integral part of the Romanian intelligentsia, academia, medical professions and business landscape, with more Jews arriving from Russia, Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and other parts of the world. But the history of Romanian Jews before the Holocaust is a study of contradictions.

On one hand, there is the story of Jacques Menachem Elias. Born in 1844 in Bucharest, Elias established the sugar industry in Romania, started one of the most important commercial banks and he owned hotels, mines, industrial facilities, huge tracts of agricultural land, businesses and buildings both in Romania and abroad. He also had real estate and companies in nine cities, including Vienna, Rome, Paris and Berlin, and he was a principal adviser to the German-born Romanian king, Carol I. For his services, Elias was awarded Romania’s highest honors and, when he died in 1923, the members of the royal family, the government, officers and the most important intellectuals in Romania mourned his loss. Elias, who had no family or children, left his huge fortune to the Romanian Academy to advance Romanian culture and establish the most modern hospital in Europe, now known as the Elias Hospital.

On the other hand, during the same time, antisemites were becoming increasingly vocal, aggressive and active, led by Corneliu Codreanu, the founder and “captain” of the murderous Iron Guard, with their green shirts, meant to imitate Adolf Hitler’s brown shirts. Codreanu gained many supporters, with the single agenda of blaming Jews for everything and demanding their expulsion and/or physical elimination.

By the end of the 1938, the official number of Jews in Romania reached 870,000 souls, making it the fourth-largest Jewish population in the world, after the United States, Poland and the former Soviet Union. However, knowing that a number of Jews were afraid to be counted or were totally unaffiliated, some contemporary demographers have estimated that the actual figure was closer to one million.

Shortly before the Second World War, with Hitler’s backing, the Iron Guard became a political force in the country, practically controlling the government, the police and many of its institutions. On a personal note, one morning in the early 1940s, while our family was still living in our big house on the premises of the manufacturing company owned by my grandmother and her brother, we heard a knock on the door, and there was our former nanny, Maria, who our parents had brought from a village to live with us and help my mother. She had left us six months earlier to get married and my parents had paid her dowry. Now she was standing there, wearing the green shirt, covered with a shawl bearing the colors of the Romanian flag, surrounded by goons, all carrying guns. Maria said that she was now the Iron Guard leader for the district – not a typical Jewish neighborhood – but that her visit was meant to thank my parents for their help and generosity and to inform her underlings that we were under her special protection.

Only a few months later, the pro-Nazi government adopted the law of Romanization, a copy of Hitler’s Aryanization, and all Jewish-owned enterprises were taken from their proprietors and sold for next to nothing to non-Jews, usually friendly with the Iron Guard. Soon afterward, Jews were expelled from the law society and associations of engineers, geologists, pharmacists, university professors and most other professional bodies, thus unable to practise their professions. Once my family’s plant was taken over by a Romanian, we were kicked out of our home and forced to live in awful conditions, for very few of the new owners of Jewish property were willing to rent to Jews.

Over the next four years, we escaped annihilation by the skin of our teeth, surviving in a basement suite, mainly due to the intervention of the royal family, especially Queen Mother Elena, and to the Romanian Orthodox Patriarch and the Catholic Nuncio for Bucharest. The queen was apparently petrified by the massacres occurring everywhere and she, supported by religious leaders, told the country’s pro-Nazi leader, Marshall Ion Antonescu, that the Jews in Bucharest and the surrounding areas were under her special protection. Unfortunately, she could not do much about other areas of the country, now practically under German control. After the establishment of the state of Israel, Queen Elena was awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations.

While the queen’s brave intervention meant that Antonescu accepted that Jews were not to be sent right away to extermination camps, the situation was still dire. There were no jobs for Jews, we could not buy much of the food available to the public, and didn’t have the money to do so, anyway. Tens of thousands of Jewish men, from the age of 16 to 65, including my father and my uncles – even many of those who had earlier converted to Christianity – were shipped to the labor camps of Transnistria in Ukraine, where 16-hour workdays on railroads or in the forests were the norm, with a bowl of half-cooked rice and a moldy piece of bread as daily nourishment. More than 200,000 Jews from Romania and the Soviet Union perished there, but my father and my uncles somehow survived. The number of Romanian Jews killed during the Shoah is now officially recognized at about 400,000.

Once the Nazi domination was over, the pessimists said that, with the Red Army in the country, it was only a matter of time until they replaced the interim government with their own stooges and Romania became a communist satellite state. These Jews left and prospered elsewhere. The optimists, my father included, argued that Romanians were too individualistic to accept a Soviet-style society and economy. He and a Jewish partner, both veterans of the liquor industry, established a wine factory and, less than two years later, had a few dozen employees and the business was booming. We were hopeful again.

In the meantime, Jewish communists were actively trying to help create a society where everyone would be equal, people would be properly rewarded for their work and hate, discrimination, corruption and ethnic strife would disappear. By the end of 1947, the communists, with the help of their Soviet advisers and backed by the Red Army, were firmly entrenched in power and the king was forced, at gunpoint, to abdicate. Immediately thereafter, Romania was proclaimed a People’s Republic, where all means of production belonged to the state. We lost everything, again.

My father, because of his unique expertise and needing to put food on the table, was hired as a foreman in a champagne-manufacturing firm, which once belonged to a family friend. That job helped my brother and me attend university, mostly reserved for the sons and daughters of the “working class,” because we were able to put on the application for admission, under our father’s profession, the word, “factory foreman.” Many years later, a “friendly” neighbor wrote a letter of denunciation to the authorities, telling them that, in reality, my parents belonged to the bourgeoisie. Thank God it couldn’t harm us anymore.

The ones who fared worst were the committed and loyal Jewish communists. In the first years, as in other communist countries, the leadership used these Jews, who had devoted their entire youth to the “cause,” as “bulldozers” to remove any sign of resistance coming from the old enemies, real or imaginary. Jews were entrusted to design and implement draconian laws and, in part because some of the country’s leaders were practically illiterate, were put in charge of prosecuting the remnants of the local fascists; were asked or volunteered to change the scholastic curriculum, to be based on Marxism/Leninism, socialist realism and other “isms”; and even wrote the speeches and statements of government officials and party leaders. Little did they know that, once their usefulness was over, they would be removed from their positions of power and replaced by “autochthons” – and this was the mildest form of punishment. For some, fabricated accusations were used to put them on trial, as being agents of an unnamed foreign power, and they ended up in jail, or worse.

Returning to Romania

While away from my birthplace, I followed what was happening there, but I had very few friends left in Bucharest, with only two of them Jews, who, as successful writers and journalists and scions of the left-wing intelligentsia, were well established and who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – leave their comfort zone. The reports I read were full of dire predictions about the chances of the minuscule Romanian Jewish community, 7,000-10,000 souls, mostly elderly, to survive another generation. I knew that there were a number of synagogues in the country, from the about 500 before the Holocaust, but little else.

The first day of my visit, I took a cab to Choral Temple, an architectural jewel built in 1857, where I attended many services with my parents and as a student. Once there, I learned that it was closed for renovations, funded by the government and B’nai B’rith International. There were some elderly Jews around who told me that I should go to the Great Synagogue, about 10 minutes away, which was functioning as the Orthodox shul during the renovations, but also housed the Holocaust museum. I went there with apprehension, not knowing what to expect, probably another bunch of retirees roaming about, I thought. Instead, I received an unexpected surprise.

The Great Synagogue, like many other Jewish institutions in Romania, is not only a story of Jewish resilience, but also of unbelievable luck under the most unfortunate circumstances. It was built not far from the emerging Jewish Quarter, in a place where four small prayer-homes belonging to different Jewish workers associations had stood. Like in other cities, the Jewish tradesmen liked to gather with their fellow workers for prayer. In the mid-19th century, under Ashkenazi leadership, they decided to have their own shul; a great majority of the much wealthier Bucharest Jews belonged to the Sephardi community. At the time of the Great Synagogue’s completion, it was the largest one in Bucharest, designed and painted in a mixture of  baroque and rococo styles. While modernized over the years, with electricity installed in 1915, it was severely damaged by a 1940 earthquake and trashed during the Nazi rebellion of 1941, but, somehow, unlike other beautiful synagogues, it remained structurally sound.

During the communist era, it barely functioned and would have shared the destiny of other synagogues in the area, along with dozens of churches, destroyed by then-president Nicolae Ceausescu, who, in the 1980s, ordered the bulldozing of thousands of homes, factories, movie theatres, schools, religious institutions and parks to build a monstrous avenue flanked by dozens of “workers buildings,” meant for the party, security and army elite. I still shiver when I recall that my childhood Malbim Synagogue and school were among the buildings turned into rubble. The same happened to the superb Baron Hirsch shul, where I went for my bar mitzvah. And nobody in the world said one word while these synagogues and churches, some dating hundreds of years, were being destroyed.

In downtown Bucharest, there is a church worth visiting for itself, but also because its interior court houses dozens of stone pillars, portals and carved inscriptions dating back centuries, rescued by courageous worshippers from the destroyed churches. Unfortunately, the terrified Jews of the 1980s didn’t have the resources to do the same with the old synagogues. The Torah scrolls, however, were rescued and kept in a safe place until 2007, when 192 scrolls, some damaged, were sent to Israel to be housed and restored by trained scribes. Eventually, a few will be returned to serve the local Jewish community.

The Great Synagogue was only spared because of its location, for it was surrounded on all sides by a group of relatively new high-rise buildings, which could not be demolished, because they were mostly occupied by party officials and other comrades.

In early 2000, the shul’s renovations were initiated and it was designated to host the Memorial Museum of Jewish Martyrs. The work was completed in 2007, and the opening was attended by the country’s prime minister, the U.S. ambassador, the chief rabbi and dozens of other dignitaries, but was still used just as a museum. Only recently, with the renovation of the Choral Temple underway, did it become a fully functioning synagogue.

When I arrived at the shul, the first thing I noticed was the lack of security. I saw a few people engaged in friendly discussions, and there was no visible concern when we entered. Once in the building, we were “greeted” by a huge poster of Gilad Shalit, demanding his release, covered by hundreds, if not thousands, of signatures. We were later told that not only Jews had signed the poster, but also visitors, students from neighboring schools and passers-by, who had heard about Shalit and wanted to show solidarity with the Israeli soldier.

We signed the poster and entered the sanctuary, with its beautiful interior, big chandeliers, a balcony for the women and a smaller one above for the choir, which I remembered from my youth. There was a tall bearded man inside, who introduced himself as a guide to the museum, which has hundreds of old photographs, documents and yellowed newspaper clippings along the long walls, and I was transported back to my youth. Many photos looked familiar and I recognized streets. I thought that I saw neighbors or friends, and could not bear the anguish for long. I was looking to leave when I heard angelic voices, the sound of laughter coming from a side door, which, I recalled, led to the small sanctuary, used for prayer groups, private functions and other activities.

I had always been told that the Jews in Bucharest, and elsewhere in the country, were mostly old and frail people who were too scared to leave earlier in life, satisfied with their positions, not very rewarding, but secure, as long as they followed the party line. So, when I heard the voices, my first thought was that some seniors were watching a movie, but, when the door opened, we saw about three dozen children, probably between the ages of eight and 12, enjoying a meal after what appeared to be a morning class, all well dressed, giggling and talking in Hebrew. In the middle was a young man dressed in rabbinical cloth, and the kids were surrounding him with obvious love. I asked the guide whether the man was a rabbi in training, and he replied with amazement: “Are you kidding, he is the prime rabbi of Romania!”

“Prime rabbi,” I stuttered. “He looks more like someone just learning and having fun.”

Afterwards, I was told a truly amazing story. The prime rabbi, Shlomo Sorin Rosen, is 32 years old and was not a Jew at birth; his father was Jewish, but his mother was not. His parents decided that the young man should choose his religion on his own and, at 15, while a student at the Bucharest high school for computers, where a limited number of very gifted pupils are selected each year to attend, he also became interested in Judaism. Rosen travelled to Israel, eventually underwent a formal conversion, and graduated university with degrees in computers and automation. He was offered a number of jobs in Romania and the United States, but instead attended for almost five years Yeshivah Chovevei Torah in New York, where he was ordained as a Modern Orthodox rabbi. He was tempted again, with both rabbinical and business jobs in the United States and Western Europe, but returned to his home country, where, after a few years, he was appointed prime rabbi of Romania in September 2007.

When we attended the next Friday evening services, it was another pleasant surprise. Despite being a rainy and cold evening, 80 to 100 people were there, people of all ages. The service was enchanting, conducted by Rosen and an older cantor with a voice of gold, plus a wonderful choir. Afterwards, everyone gathered in the small sanctuary to enjoy a warm Shabbat meal, and I felt at home!

The other fully functioning synagogue in Bucharest, besides two prayers rooms in the city’s Jewish retirement homes, is the Chabad House, located in the centre of the city. The original synagogue, Yeshoah Tova, was built in 1827. It was spared destruction by the Nazis and the communists because it was on a block lined with buildings once owned by wealthy people where, later, famous artists, journalists, leaders and writers lived.

It fell into disrepair until the mid-1990s, when Chabad purchased the building and sent Rabbi Naftali Deutsch from Israel to establish a shul there. The synagogue functioned in a half-finished building until 2007, when the renovations were completed.

When we visited, we noticed that here, too, there was no security at the synagogue, where one enters directly from the street into the sanctuary, magnificently restored to its former glory. There were a few young people inside studying holy books, not from printed texts but from laptop computers, and chanting along with the texts on the screens, each at his own pace.

We were offered tea and uga (sweets) and given a tour. What started from practically nothing a bit more than 10 years ago is a now Or Avner, an institution with a school and a kindergarten with about 100 students, daily and evening services, a kitchen serving kosher meals twice a day, and making deliveries for those wishing a Jewish meal at home. Nearly 300 people gather every Shabbat for services.

“What about antisemitism?” I asked. Antisemitism must be somewhere in the city, they replied, but they could not wish for better neighbors. There was not even one complaint during the construction, nothing but good wishes and smiles. A young man told me that, during the previous Passover, he took his wife and their baby to a park for a picnic. People came up to them curious about the matzah they were eating and asked if they could try a piece.

The former Royal Palace in the centre of Bucharest is one of the most impressive and recognized structures in the city, housing, since the king’s forced abdication, the National Art Gallery. We were walking one day towards the palace, located not far from our hotel, when we saw a huge sign featuring a giant dragon with red flames bursting out of his mouth next to a group of naked people perched on a structure about to be consumed by the fire. The image – a famous work by a renowned Jewish artist, painted during the dark days of persecution by the Romanian Nazis – was somewhat frightening. It was promoting the exhibition Destinies at Crossroads: Jewish Artists During the Period of the Holocaust, which had opened a few weeks earlier, but people were still lining up to see it.

We entered with some trepidation and watched and listened to some of the agitated discussions, especially among the younger visitors, who were taken aback by the intensity of the anger and despair permeating from most of the canvases. I realized that not many can really understand how dark the days of the 1930s and ’40s were for Romanian Jews, unless they were there.

At the end of our entire journey, I reconsidered the anger and fear I felt when landing in Bucharest. I went there to visit some old friends and, perhaps, to say Kaddish for the dying Jewish community. Instead, I found out that there are more than 40 Jewish communities across the country, with synagogues, old-age homes, cultural centres and schools, and I visited the new and thriving Jewish community centre in Bucharest, full of young people, went to the Jewish theatre and read a copy of the well-written monthly The Jewish Reality. I left the country saying yasher koach!

Jack Chivo PhD is a retired foreign correspondent for several U.S. and European media organizations and former lecturer in ethics in journalism, now living in West Vancouver.

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