Romanian synagogue hate daubing is tip of the iceberg

THE DAUBING of a phrase denying the Holocaust on a synagogue in Romania last month has upset the Jewish community, which is already reeling from a spate of antisemitic attacks.

“The Holocaust never happened” was scribbled in English on the walls of the Neolog Synagogue in Cluj, a Transylvanian city which saw almost all its Jews — about 130,000 — deported to Auschwitz following the Nazi occupation that began in March 1944.

“I was enraged,” said Andrea Julika Ghita-Szekely, a journalist and senior member of the Jewish community in Cluj. “It is not so much the Holocaust denial — which is abundant online — that annoys me, but the fact that this is a memorial to the deported and a listed building, and it will be difficult to clean. What is amazing is the fact that no other place of worship in Cluj has ever been desecrated,” she said.

Cluj is home to 400 Jews and has a klezmer orchestra, a Jewish choir, people offering free Hebrew lessons and a Jewish school, as well as cultural and religious programmes.

The police in Cluj

Upsetting: the Cluj shul being cleaned are investigating the incident but so far have not identified any suspects.

In Bucharest, by contrast, police quickly tracked down those who desecrated ten tombstones in a Jewish cemetery last April. It turned out to be a group of children who wrecked memorials weighing several tonnes.

Alexandru Florian, the director of the Elie Wiesel Institute for the Research of the Holocaust in Romania, is not surprised by the hate daubing in Cluj.

He cites a study conducted by his institute on antisemitism and hate speech on Romanian Facebook.

“We reported a very large number of such cases and asked Facebook to take them down, but 90 per cent of our requests have been rejected,” he said.

Mr Florian said his institute reported a bomb threat to police a year ago, but added that no action had so far been taken.

Mr Florian and the publicly-funded Elie Wiesel Institute have been a constant target for far-right activists, who blame him for an “anti-Romania” campaign.

He adds, however: “The saddest thing is that there are messages directed at my institute or myself coming from the mainstream, from public intellectuals.”