The Australian Jewish News (Melbourne) (March 15, 1985)
In the week that Israel's Prime Minister visited Romania, Derek Kartun examined the state of the Jewish community.
THE HUNGARIAN lady from the country town of Oradea had once been wealthy. Her husband, dead now, manufactured furniture. Now she is 74 and has a brain tumor.
Her corner of the room she shares with two other ladies in the Rosen old people's home and hospital in Bucharest is intensely personal. There is a fine Turkish carpet on the bed and two oil paintings of some quality on the wall.
On a carved chest of drawers, framed portraits and pieces of china are arranged. This is what is left from the old days. Once she was a nurse. That was why she did orderly duty in the medical unit at Auschwitz.
We talked about her four years in the hospital and then, as farewells were exchanged, she darted to the chest and drew from a drawer an ordinary table-knife. "I kept this," she said. "It was used in the medical unit. I worked there with Dr. Mengele."
Correction: it was not an ordinary table knife; it had a swastika engraved on the handle. If true, the lady's story is as chilling a summary of what the past has done to the present of Eastern Europe's Jews as you could conceive. If it was imagined, perhaps it is even more poignant.
Or you can take the Rosen Home itself as a symbol of what our century has done to Romania's Jews. It opened in 1980 and is arguably one of the best institutions of its kind in Europe; imaginatively and humanely run, with an impressive degree of individual care for each of its 200 residents.
Part of the cost was borne by the American Joint Distribution Committee and part by the Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief. The director, Professor Marcel Saragea, is a former Deputy Minister of Health, now doing a new job at the age of 70. Some 70 per cent of the residents are aged 80 or over.
"It is wrong to say there are 30,000 Jews in Romania," Professor Saragea says. "There are 30,000 largely old Jews; half are over 60. Some are poor and some are not, but the key factor is that the community is old and getting older.
"My wife and I have privileged conditions, but in ten years' time, who will buy us bread and give us a glass of water?"
He points out that State pensions are very low and that an aging community which is not renewing itself needs help, including far more facilities like the Rosen Home.
At the Martin Balus Home nearby, the brothers, Adolf and Simca Halpern, 85 and 78, put on a strange double-act, the one constantly contradicting the other and both searching through an ancient wardrobe for long-forgotten photographs. "No complaints," they say in unison.
Stefania Feuerwerk, a distinguished lady of 81, was employed at the Ministry of Foreign Trade. "It is very good here. I have not enough words..."
But it is not very good. The building is hopelessly unsuited to its task and resources are lacking. Romania is not a rich country and limited resources go into the rehousing program and the creation of new industries.
"No single Jew in Romania needing help fails to get it," says the renowned Chief Rabbi Rosen, dwarfed by the great carved back of his chair, set amid the books and papers of his office. "They don't have to come to us; we go to them.
"We serve over 2,500 kosher meals daily, and no one knows who pays and who doesn't. We help 6,200 members of the community in various ways. Looking at a man's clothes, no one will know whether they were donated or not."
The heart of the matter in Romania, as in nearly all the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, is the question of numbers. Half of Romania's 800,000 Jews escaped slaughter, and of those who survived, 350,000 emigrated to Israel to form the second-largest community there. This "Romanian" concentration exerts a powerful pull on Romania's remaining 30,000 Jews, whose emigration rate is about 1,300 a year and seems relatively trouble-free.
And so this aging community, largely made up of survivors, cannot renew itself. It can only die away with what dignity and comfort it can achieve, with help from wealthier communities abroad, leaving behind it the splendid synagogues, the museums of Judaica, the Jewish influences in Romanian culture, and the memories of the shtetl, the echo of Yiddish and Hebrew songs.
Any demographer will tell you that is the way it is going. The old culture which had its roots in the country towns of Moldavia and Transylvania will simply cease to exist.
Today, there are 500 students in Talmud Torah classes, there are 18 choirs and four amateur orchestras, and the Federation of Jewish Communities publishes and sells 16,000 copies of its Jewish calendar. There are 105 functioning synagogues nationwide, serving 62 communities. There are three rabbis and eight shochetim.
"We can proclaim our Jewish identity without shame or fear, including solidarity with Israel," says Theodore Blumenfeld, president of the Federation. But what it seems that the Jews of Romania cannot do for much longer is maintain a living presence in a land that bears traces of their distant ancestors 1,900 years ago and offers some 600 years of recorded history.
This process of attenuation takes on strange forms. In the heart of what was formerly the Jewish quarter of Bucharest stands the impressive Fraterna Street Synagogue. Built in 1858, it is well endowed with marble columns, mosaics, murals, and lavish candelabra. But today it is a food store.
Cartons of dried milk, cheeses, and rice are piled high against the ark. There are bags of flour in the women's gallery, and flagons of oil, pots of honey, and piles of canned goods where the faithful used to pray.
In the forecourt, at a trestle table, Arnold Gelber, 74, former accountant and one-time forced laborer, is filling an ancient haversack with his regular allocation of food. His son is in Israel.
Is he satisfied with the help he gets from the community? He is not a talker. "Of course," he says. Then without further ado back to packing the soap, peas, sardines, milk powder.
Blanche Hodos, 65, is also collecting her food and has brought her young nephew to help her carry it home. If there had been no nephew, someone would have delivered the parcel.
Over at the Calarasi old people's home, there are 18 ladies in residence! Their ages range from 68 to 97. At the central kosher kitchen, Sama Broida in a white coat and felt hat controls the kashrut. He is 82. And the Chief Rabbi himself is 72. These are the truly significant statistics of Romanian Jewry.
Out in the countryside, the story repeats itself. At Suceava in Moldavia, there were 8,000 Jews, 13 synagogues. Today, there are 310 in the community, 70 of them on assistance. Every six weeks the peripatetic Rabbi Katz visits; the last resident rabbi left for Israel three years ago.
In Dorohoi, there were three rabbis serving 11,000 Jews. Today's community of 400 has to share its rabbi with others. The president makes a speech full of such facts and ends by asking for a heater for the mikva and a van for community use.
The Central British Fund is to raise the money to buy a van. There are eager children in these communities, but by no means enough of them.
In Botosani, 420 Jews remain out of 18,000, and only two of the 72 synagogues are in use. Some 230 Jews are over 60 years of age. But there is an enthusiastic choir of 27 children, for whom Israel and not Romania is the promised land. Recently 33 Jews left Piatra Neamt for Israel, reducing the total there from 415 to 382. It had once been 14,000.
Two of the splendid synagogues — one of them the wooden structure 500 years old where the Baal Shem Tov once was a rabbi — are now preserved as national monuments by the State.From Bacau, 41 have gone to Israel so far this year, and 70 went last year, 83 the year before. And so it goes.
Iasi, where a notorious wartime slaughter claimed 1 7,000 victims, a Jewish population of 1,800 gives a greater impression of continuity. There are 140 children at the Talmud Torah, and the town council has just granted a 25-year rent-free lease on an imposing mansion for the community to establish its new social center, restaurant, and medical service.
Simion Kaufmann, the forceful president of the community, says he has good relations with the mayor and the local party secretary. "I can reach all levels." But some 40 to 50 families are leaving Iasi each year for Israel.
As far as we know, it will soon be 2,000 years since the First Jewish slaves went into the area in the Roman baggage trains. It has been a long story, with its horrors and glories, its privations and indomitable spirit. But now, it seems, a valedictory is being written at last. Future articles in this series will look at the Jewish communities of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland.