Israeli President Isaac Herzog and his wife Michal on Sunday visited the city of Iași, Romania, to begin their state visit to the country.
Herzog is due to attend a state ceremony marking 85 years since the Iași pogrom, one of the worst massacres of Romanian Jewry during the Holocaust, in which thousands of Jews were murdered, according to the President’s Office.
The ceremony will be held at the city’s Jewish cemetery, where many of the pogrom’s victims lie in a mass grave.
Herzog is scheduled to attend a reburial ceremony for 22 victims of the pogrom whose remains were recently identified, after which he will visit the Holocaust museum and additional memorial sites in the city. On X, Herzog wrote “will hold meetings with President Nicușor Dan and Romania’s political leadership, and address the joint plenary of the Romanian Parliament, where I will pay tribute to the longstanding friendship and cooperation between Israel and Romania.”
Romanian Foreign Minister Toiu Oana wrote on X on Saturday about the pogrom, in which some 13,000 Jews were murdered. She did not mention Herzog’s visit.
“Over 13,000 Romanian Jews were killed in the city or on the “death trains”. Romanian citizens, killed by a Romanian regime that many still heroize today by falsifying history. The truth cannot be avoided, it must be assumed, and Romania has begun to assume it,” wrote Oana.
She also mentioned how “some Romanian diplomats who opposed the decision to mark the passports of Jews [had] helped many people to be saved in time from extermination. Even in the darkest episodes of history, there were heroes,” adding that she had discussed this with Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, whom U.S. President Donald Trump appointed last year to serve as U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism.
Romania had some 800,000 Jews before the Holocaust. Today, the minority’s population is estimated as about 8,000.
