Presentation: Special Session of the Romanian Parliament to Mark Holocaust Commemoration Day
This solemn day of commemoration for the victims of the Holocaust in Romania falls during the week of Sukkot on the Hebrew calendar. Sukkot or the Feast of Booths as it is also known is celebrated with the building of a booth or Sukkah, a temporary dwelling that is fragile and open to the elements and where Jews during this week share their meals.
This Sukkah, according to Jewish tradition, is to remind us of the fragile and temporary dwellings that the Israelites built during their arduous, forty year journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. Escape from slavery in Egypt was only the first stage of this journey, beset as they were by all the natural hardships of a desert existence and mortal enemies besieging them. But at the end there was redemption, freedom, and a land of their own to enter.
It is a very different journey that we recall today when we remember the story of the Holocaust in Romania. Jews who had been rooted and integrated in this region for generations found themselves barred from their professions, pulled from their homes, their possessions looted, and sent on a journey of unspeakable suffering and death.
The murder of European Jewry was planned in Nazi Germany, but in nearly all countries they had their accomplices and collaborators. Among the worst of them was Romania, where the systematic persecution of the Jews was carried out by the Romanian State in a campaign set in motion by Ion Antonescu in October 1941.
For decades the truth of this was ignored, instrumentalized, or distorted. Only when a free and democratic Romania emerged was it possible to confront and come to terms with this history.
And so another journey began—not a physical one but a quest for the truth, a genuine effort to recapture and then retell the authentic history of this dark period. As recently as six years ago there were many who denied the Romanian Holocaust altogether. But six years ago a process was set in motion. An international commission was established which included historians from Romania and abroad and which was chaired by Elie Wiesel. It was endorsed by political leaders from all major parties, and it was given the task of researching the history of the Holocaust in Romania and the freedom to work independently and critically. In slightly less than two years it completed its assignment. And in December 2005 it presented its findings.
But this was not the end but rather only a first important step on a still longer journey. The Commission saw the need to spread its results throughout Romanian society, to provide a center for continued research, to develop educational programs that would reach school children, to provide the means for public ceremony and places for commemoration. These were also part of a wide-ranging set of recommendations that the Romanian Government accepted and began to implement.
We can look back today and see that a great deal has been accomplished. We know too that we have had our own version of the fragile, storm-buffeted Sukkah along the way, wondering whether the research institute would be opened, whether this solemn day of remembrance would be fixed on the official Romanian calendar, and, dare I say, whether this remarkable Holocaust memorial in Bucharest would be completed in time for today’s scheduled dedication. The journey is not over yet, and we may well come upon new stumbling blocks in the days and weeks ahead, but we cannot deny the progress that has been made.
As we recall that terrible tragedy of the Holocaust in Romania, which was set in motion 68 years ago, it is not enough merely to be faithful to history. Memory must also be a lesson for the present. Anti-Semitism and extremism, ethnic and racial incitement, base appeals to prejudice and nationalistic tendencies can all be found today in Romania, in Europe and in much of the world, and we must do everything we can to fight their spread. Only in this way can we truly honor those victims and give meaning to their deaths.
Zichronam l’Vrachah, we say. May their memory be a blessing. And may we be worthy to receive it.
