In 1930 Romania had been home to 759,000 Jews. At the close of World War II about half of them had survived the Holocaust. With the exception of the Soviet Union, Romania had now the greatest number of Jews in all of Europe. Between 1949 and 1989, with some short interruptions, communist Romania cynically sold its Jews to the state of Israel, as the trade of human beings became a state policy.
The end of the war had brought two alternatives to Romania's Jewish community: to emigrate or to try live in a rapidly communized society. While desperate Romanian Jews crammed aboard ships headed for Palestine and Israel, others became members of the Communist Party. In spite of the communist rhetoric about Romanian antisemitism, home grown but also Kremlin-inspired, did not disappear. Just as Jews had been blamed for modernization and for the birth of capitalism in Romania in the nineteenth century, the coming of communism was laid at their feet. In 1949, Romanian communists began a brutal campaign against the Zionists. Over the course of the next ten years, 250 Zionist leaders and low-ranking militants were arrested, interrogated under terrible conditions, and tried by military courts. Up to the mid-1950s, Jewish mid-level communist militants were condemned to prison and in one case even executed namely in the Patrascanu case, the Romanian equivalent of the Slansky and Raijk Stalinist antisemitic show trials from Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
In July 1959 a group of six Jews, closely associated with the power structures of the Romanian Communist Party (RCP), successfully robbed a bank. Caught two months later, they were all executed with one exception. While this affair remains murky in terms of the real motivations of the robbers, it is certain that the bank attack was used in a documentary movie by the RCP as propaganda with antisemitic undertones.
In the meantime, slowly but surely the Jews who made it to the power structures of communist Romania were purged; the Ministry of Foreign Trade was one of the first government agencies strongly affected by this policy. On November 13, 1958, the RCP's leadership of the above named ministry was changed. It was clearly stated on this occasion that the national and social compositions of the ministry should be changed. Jews from Romanian foreign trade institutions were clearly targeted not only by being demoted, but also by Securitate-enhanced surveillance and trials. Between 1960 and 1964, five trials in which twenty-nine persons, all working for foreign trade government enterprises, were condemned for crimes undermining the national economy, plotting against the social order, and disclosing state secrets. Out of these twenty-nine individuals, twenty-seven were Jewish. The defendants were tortured and often forced to admit crimes that were never committed. In certain cases, like in the one of Adalbert Rosinger, the Securitate investigators were blatantly antisemitic during the interrogations, saying, for example: “It would have been better if Hitler would have finished you all.” From the testimonies of former secret police officers it is known today that these investigations and trials were ordered by Alexandru Draghici, a member of the RCP Politburo, in charge of Securitate supervision, and henchman of Gheorghe Gheorghiu–Dej, the RCP General Secretary.
The case of Adalbert Rosinger was very poignant. Rosinger was a former inmate of the Vapniarka camp in Transnistria, where communist Jews and Jews suspected of communism where interned under very harsh conditions by the Romanian war-time fascist administration. Arrested in June 1961, beaten up and tortured by the Securitate for three years, he was put on trial in June 1964 and condemned to fifteen years of hard labor. A victim of two totalitarian regimes simply because he was Jewish, he was set free after eight years and four months of prison and was allowed to emigrate to Israel in 1978 after several interventions on his behalf by the US Congress.
Veronica Rozenberg's book Jewish Foreign Trade Officials on Trial is an important analysis of one of the forgotten episodes of communist antisemitism in Romania, an antisemitism that succeeded where Romanian fascism partially failed, namely to eliminate in almost totality Jews from Romania.
