Romanian Jews’ emigration to Israel after World War II was a process that interested the communist regime in Bucharest not only politically but also financially. Between 1948 and 1989, most Romanian Jews were allowed to emigrate following confidential agreements between Romania and Israel.
Radu Ioanid is a historian and archivist for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and presently the ambassador of Romania to Israel (from 2020). His volume opens with a concise foreword by Elie Wiesel. According to Wiesel, Ioanid's revelations “concern the transformation of the Romanian government into an extraordinary merchant of human beings during the postwar years. If 380,000 Romanian Jews established themselves in the Jewish State, it is because Romania ‘sold’ them as if they were slaves” (xiv).
Ioanid analyzes relationships between Communist Romania and Israel through the prism of the important and older Jewish community that was subjected to antisemitic pressures just after the international recognition of Romanian independence at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. These currents and antisemitic policies were found abundantly also in the interwar and communist regimes, throughout the twentieth century in Romania.
A rough calculation would indicate that, between 1968 and 1989, Nicolae Ceaușescu sold 40,577 Jews to Israel for $112,498,800, at a price of $2,500 and later at $3,300 per person (142). But, in a 1960 exchange of some Jewish families, the Romanian Communists were going to receive 100 Australian Merino sheeps, twenty-five head of Jersey cattle, and thirty Landrace pigs (71).
Chapter 1, “‘The Jews Are Our Misfortune’: Anti-Semitism in Romania, from the Congress of Berlin to World War II,” discusses the continuing antisemitism in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth in Romania. Ioanid added, however, that in a sense, the ensuing period between 1923 and 1937 represented a golden age of human rights for Romanian Jews (5). The general policy toward Jews during the WWII was one of terror, plunder, rape, deportation, and murder (8). At least 270,000 Jews under Romanian jurisdiction died in the Holocaust, either on the explicit orders of Romanian officials or as a consequence of their criminal barbarity (8). Chapter 2, “Voting with Their Feet: Jewish Emigration before the Fall of the Iron Curtain” explores the incipient emigration of the Jews from Romania to Palestine, 1945–47. Chapter 3, “The Zionist Enemy,” focus on early diplomatic relations between Romania and Israel and the first arrangements of emigration of the Jews from the communist state. Chapter 4, “Barter,” presents the first important ransom of the Romanian Jews, after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Romania (1958). Chapter 5, “An Uneasy Relationship,” presents Nicolae Ceaușescu's policies toward the Jews in the late 1960s until 1989. From 1958, when Romania again opened its doors, until 1965, when Ceaușescu came into power, 107,540 Romanian Jews had emigrated to Israel. Between 1969 and Ceaușescu's fall from power in 1989, Jewish emigration to Israel stabilized at an annual average rate of 1,997 (86). At the end of the 1980s, Israel's diplomatic relations with Romania tottered and it relations with Yasser Arafat improved; also, from 1986 Ceaușescu's role as a mediator between eastern bloc countries and Israel began to decline (114). Chapter 6, “The Money Trail,” describes the so-called the golden era of the “barter period.” Ioanid argues from unpublished documents of one of the Securitate's archives in Romania (ACNSAS) that between 1967 and 1987 the price paid by Israel to Romania for one Jewish person was $2,500 for a graduate, $1,500 for a student, $510 for a skilled worker, and $410 for an unskilled person or a child (125). Chapters 7, “The Washington Equation” and 8, “Why Did You Drain My Soul?,” concludes most of the main investigations of Ioanid's book: relations between Ceaușescu, the US, and Israel and the evolution on the Jews’ ransom especially in the 1970s and 80s. The author adds that Israel purchased Jews from countries other than Romania. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Hungary was paid $1,000 per emigrant, and Bulgaria between $50 and $350 (158).
This analysis of Radu Ioanid's book is being performed before an audience that is part of the evolution of the Romanian-Israeli relationship after World War II until the fall of the communist regime, combining the unique problem of the ransom of Romanian Jews.
