Another day, another commemoration of massacred Jews. What else isn’t new?
Don’t expect headlines about Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Romania. Not even most locals know that of more than 750,000 Jews who on the eve of World War II inhabited its picturesque regions—serially fought over by one empire or another—about half were slaughtered in the Holocaust. After factoring in emigration, deaths, suicide, etc., today they officially total about 8,600.
Herzog arrived in the ancient city of Iași to commemorate one of the worst massacres of Romanian Jewry, starting on June 28, 1941. Of the city’s multi-ethnic population of 100,000, fully one-third were Jews, many having lived there for three centuries. But on that fateful day began one of the most brutal spectacles of fascist hatred, displayed in full public view with an exhibitionist zeal the world had yet to consider normal.
The occasion of the Israeli leader’s trip is the reburial of 22 victims whose remains were recently identified. Moreover, he and his wife, Michal Herzog, would also meet the handful of survivors who help the rest of us remember.
The facts are painstakingly documented by Bucharest native Radu Ioanid, since 2020 Romania’s ambassador to Israel, in his prize-winning book The Iași Pogrom, June-July 1941: A Photo Documentary from the Holocaust in Romania. But the sheer terror of those days is inconceivable.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler had just announced that the recently formed Axis, consisting of Germany, Italy and Japan, would invade the Soviet Union. By then, Hungary (then Romania) and finally Bulgaria had joined as well. Of the latter three, however, it was in Romania that the powder keg first exploded against the Jews. For it was home to the most extreme, violent, pseudo-religious fascist political party in Europe: the Iron Guard, psychopathic killers against whom the mostly docile and generous ordinary Romanians didn’t have much of a say.
Iași had been swarming with German and Romanian military units for weeks. Within days of the announcement, as Soviet planes bombarded the city, under the pretext that Jews had signaled Soviet planes, thousands were murdered in their homes and in the streets. Thousands more were arrested and summarily shot. Some 4,300 survivors were loaded onto sealed cattle cars. More than half died of thirst and suffocation. The terrors were to leave an indelible mark on everyone who witnessed them.
I learned about this from one of them: Meir Rosenne. In 1983, he was named Israel’s ambassador to the United States. But his humor, warmth and genuine humility, which barely disguised his brilliance, were utterly disarming. As soon as we started speaking Romanian, it seemed that we had always known each other. Except that I had merely left communism in its earlier stages, before its true lethality became impossible to ignore; he, by contrast, had seen hell at its most obscene.
Far from reticent, he talked about it with intensity, explaining that despite being only 10 in 1941, the experience marked him for life. Forced to wear the yellow Star of David after the pogrom, his father, Jacob Rosenhaupt—a Hebrew-speaking Francophile and highly respected member of his community—told him to “wear it with pride.”
That the family survived at all was due to his father’s prudence and insight; he was able to save more than 1,000 people, who have regularly thanked him ever since.
At last, the family escaped to Mandatory Palestine in 1944. Once he turned 17, Meir fought in the War of Independence. Then, after 1948, determined to become a diplomat, he went to school in Paris and finished his doctoral dissertation on International Law at the Sorbonne. But he still had much work to do beyond diplomacy; he could never forget Iași and the old world, which wasn’t finished with the sliver of Jews still left there. One totalitarianism was mercifully dead, but the other was on the ascendant.
After Israel’s admission to the United Nations and its unwillingness to become anyone’s puppet, Hitler’s spurned ally, Stalin, bared his fangs. Already in 1951, it was becoming clear that Jews inside the Soviet empire were in increasingly grave danger. While the Israeli state could ill afford to openly antagonize Stalin, a clandestine operation was organized, determined to “ingather the exiles” from behind that Iron Curtain.
Reporting directly to the prime minister, it became known as “Nativ” (“way” in Hebrew), or the Liaison Office. Discreetly and thus most effectively, Rosenne agreed to help through the Paris offices of the World Jewish Council. From there, he could coordinate efforts to enable Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union.
But it was after the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, as author of the legal drafts for the delegates to the ceasefire talks between Egypt and Israel, that he became widely recognized as “one of Israel’s foremost diplomats.”
Appointed ambassador to France in 1979, he served with such exceptional distinction that he was later awarded the Légion d’Honneur for his outstanding efforts to promote relations between the two countries. And with it came the plum posting of envoy to America.
Which is where I met him, and our families became close. My parents had also tried to leave for Palestine in 1944—indeed, as it turned out, on one of the two ships that left with Meir’s family. A painting of those ships, hung in his embassy, is a permanent reminder of a terrible story. Only one survived; the other would be sunk by German torpedoes, drowning hundreds of passengers.
The experience was the next most traumatic event in his life after the Iași pogrom. What I realized only much later was that my parents had been scheduled to board on the very ship that sank.
This year marks a decade since Meir’s sudden death at the age of 84. As if the world didn’t have enough coincidences to marvel about, I found mention of this same painting in a story published in the Lifestyle section of The Washington Post on Nov. 20, 1983. The author noted in passing that the ambassador was waiting to host the then-president of Israel, Chaim Herzog. Meir would surely be thrilled to know that it will be Chaim’s son, Isaac, who, in his capacity as Israel’s current president, will this week officially mark the pogrom in Romania.
Rest in peace, Meir, the 22 newly interred innocents and all the millions whom we forget at our own risk.
