A Buried Past
Searching for Stories
During my visit to Romania I connected most directly with the neshamot of my forebears. My search for the stories of my cousins who did not leave before the war continued. I became aware in my travels that there is a deeply buried Jewish past in Romania and the path toward uncovering my relatives’ stories is as tangled and impenetrable as the cemetery grounds.
The buried past of the Romanian Jews is both figurative and literal. In 2019, a mass grave was found in Stanca Roznovanu, northeast of Iași. The remains were found near a mass grave found in Vulturi, Romania in 2010 (Reuters staff, July 2, 2019). Just before my visit, a third mass grave including the remains of children was found in the Popricani forest near Popiricani village (Frazer,2019). In 2014, a scientific investigation concluded that the mass killings in the Popircani forest outside of Iași were conducted by the Romanian military. (Frazer, 2019).
The decimation of the Jewish population in Romania is echoed by the continued contemporary erasure of the history and current existence of Jews of Romania. The past genocide, which is also contemporary, is being re-enacted through deliberate individual acts and official Romanian government actions and policies (Aderet, 2019). The recent vandalism of a Jewish cemetery in Romania where 73 tombstones were destroyed is an example of a deliberate individual antisemitic act (Marinus, 2019). The Iași municipal government’s destruction of the historic entry archway to the Iași cemetery is an example of systemic antisemitism (Aderet, 2019). The government of Romania, both on local and national levels, controls the space and property of the former Jewish inhabitants of Romania (Aderet, 2019). This hegemonic silent oppression is expressed in myriad bureaucratic practices such as the underfunding of the Jewish museum in Iași and the destruction of the archway of the Jewish cemetery with the excuse that it was a safety hazard. As argued by Nelson (2002), the regulation of space can be racist, or in this case, antisemitic, through being subtly hidden by pseudo-logical administrative arguments.
The legal regulation of space governs what can and cannot happen within it, in ways that may not be obviously defined as racist in law itself, nor perhaps to a community not directly and negatively affected by such regulation….the regulation and limitation of spaces of resistance are easily masked as a necessary measure to protect the public, a reasonable and equitable measure that applies equally to all citizens, rather than targeting any specific group (Nelson, 212-213).
Thus, the destruction of the cemetery archway is a symbol for the continued removal of the existence of the Jews in Iași. The crumbling cemetery itself is a metaphor for the inherent antisemitism in its very abandonment by the Romanian government and among its citizens. When I asked why the cemetery is in shambles, I was told that it was because the Jews do not have the resources to care for the cemetery and that in Romania it is the responsibility of the particular group to care for its own cemetery. I was told, for example, that the Catholic cemetery is cared for by the Church. Who is to care for the neshamot whose waves of love wafted throughout the beautiful hills within the garden of the cemetery? Whose responsibility is it to care for remaining artifacts of a community when the government itself is responsible for that community’s destruction?