Romania’s President Basescu sent message to commemoration conference of pogrom in Iasi (Jun 29, 2006)

Jun 29, 2006 (Romania Report)

Yesterday, President Traian Basescu delivered a message to the International Conference ‘The Iasi Pogrom (June 28-30, 1941) – The Prologue of Holocaust in Romania’.

Sixty-five years ago, during the Iasi pogrom over 12,000 Romanian Jews were killed. To commemorate this tragic event, an International Conference was organised by the ‘Elie Wiesel’ National Institute for Holocaust Study in Romania, the Institute of Judaic Studies in Romania, „Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University in Iasi and the Jewish Community from Iasi.

Among those who attended the Conference were representatives of Romanian Presidency and Government, diplomats accredited in Romania, scholars from Romania and abroad.

President Basescu’s message to the Conference reads: “65 years ago, Iasi turned into a stage of horrors and crimes that marked the beginning a systematic process of physical elimination of Jewish people from Romania—action started by the political authorities particular order. The ideology of racial hate came up with invented pretexts to motivate detention and executions, looting and torture as punishment for a invented treason. The evil preparation actions of the June 28-20 pogrom were undertaken by fuelling anti-Semitic sentiments and mass psychosis. Pulled out from their houses at night, terrorised, humiliated, falsely accused, the Jews from Iasi were gathered at the questure, some of them being executed on the spot, some of them being submitted to a terrifying agony, as being forced to step over dead bodies and be locked up into overcrowded death trains where many died asphyxiated and a but a few managed to come out alive from this horrific journey.”

Romania’s President message also mentioned the “urgency of critically assess of our past and consciously assume our responsibilities. It is also about the urgency of assuming the memory and the history lesson of such a terrifying event.”



The Iaşi Pogrom

During the early part of World War II, Iaşi was the site of a pogrom which was the largest massacre of Jews in Romania. During the war, while the full scale of the Holocaust remained generally unknown to the Allied Powers, the Iaşi pogrom stood as one of the known, well-documented examples of Axis brutality toward the Jews.

The pogrom lasted from June 29–July 6, 1941, and approximately 14,000 people, or half the Jewish population, was massacred either in the pogrom itself (around 2,000 Jews), or in its aftermath (around 12,000 Jews), and the rest were deported. Under express orders from military dictator and German ally Ion Antonescu, the city was to be "cleansed" of its Jewish population. Orders also specified that Section Two of the General Headquarters of the Romanian army and the Special Intelligence Service (SSI) of Romania were to spread rumors of Jewish treachery in the press, including ones that Jews were guiding Soviet military aircraft by placing lights in their houses' chimneys. A systematic massacre by the Iaşi police, Romanian and German soldiers, and a portion of the citizens of Iaşi followed; the remaining Jewish population was loaded onto overcrowded, sealed "death trains" that drove slowly back and forth across the country until most of their passengers were killed by hyperthermia, thirst, or infection and bleeding. Six non-Jewish citizens of Iaşi are credited with saving around one hundred Jews (see Righteous Among the Nations), but, according to the official Romanian report on the subject, the vast majority of the population of the city did nothing to intervene, and a certain portion joined in the killing.



Romania Report