President Isaac Herzog attended a Romanian state ceremony on Sunday marking the 85th anniversary of the Iași pogrom, where he delivered a speech warning of the dangers of antisemitism in the present day.
In June of 1941, more than 13,000 Jewish inhabitants of Iași, constituting around one-third of the city’s Jewish population, were massacred by the Nazi-aligned Romanian authorities. Today, the community numbers in the hundreds.
The ceremony was held at the Iași Jewish cemetery and included representatives of the Romanian government, city leadership, and members of the local Jewish community.
Chief Rabbi of Romania, Rabbi Rafael Shaffer, opened the ceremony with the recitation of Kaddish, followed by Herzog’s speech. Afterward, a reburial ceremony for newly identified victims of the massacre took place.
In his speech, Herzog made a connection between the antisemitism of the Holocaust era and the antisemitism Jews experience in the present day.
‘Antisemitism is once again rearing its ugly head’
“This act of remembrance for the many thousands of Jewish women, men, children, and elderly murdered on this soil, in Iași and its surroundings between June 28 and July 6, 1941, does not erase the suffering of the victims,” Herzog said.
“Nor does it lessen the ethical stain of the perpetrators. It does not undo the murder, the humiliation, the beatings, or the death trains, orchestrated high up, but unleashed across every level of society, during those infernal summer days, 85 years ago.”
“Nor does it help us make sense of this simple but burning question: How? How can cruelty of this scope, across an entire society, possibly be comprehended?”
Herzog directed focus to the achievements of Romanian Jews, such as the founding of Rosh Pina in northern Israel and Naftali Herz Imber’s composition of ‘Hatikva,’ Israel’s national anthem.
“It is therefore all the more alarming that in too many places across Europe, and through the sinister influence of an evil empire that traffics in hatred,” Herzog remarked, “antisemitism is again rearing its ugly head.”
“The moral infrastructure that humanity established in response to the moral destruction of the Holocaust is weaker than it has been for eighty years,” he continued.
“This is a danger for Jews, this is a danger for all people of goodwill. It is therefore our shared responsibility to recognize and name this danger, to actively embrace the moral calling it invokes, and to fiercely combat it. Let that be the lesson of Iași,” he concluded.
Herzog is set to address the Romanian Parliament on Monday.
