One day last month, in the main Jewish cemetery in the Moldovan capital Chisinau, a few volunteers busied themselves mowing grass, trimming trees and resetting dilapidated headstones.
The work was the initiative of the capital’s dwindling Jewish community, a preservation effort to protect the memory of its ancestors who once numbered many, many more.
The Moldovan government of Prime Minister Pavel Filip has announced a number of projects to highlight the past and present of Moldova’s Jewish community, including a museum of Jewish History that was announced in October and will be dedicated to Holocaust remembrance, and the restoration of the Chisinau cemetery.
Filip has also said the state will restore a ruined funeral synagogue, the only one of its kind in Europe’s poorest country. And authorities say they plan to erect a Jewish cultural and historical centre on the site of the Chisinau cemetery, though no clear schedule has been announced.
On the eve of World War Two, the Jewish population of Moldova numbered some 275,000. By 2014, just 1,600 Moldovan citizens declared themselves as Jewish out of a population of 3.5 million.
But the government’s efforts to remember them has been met with some criticism.
Vandalism
Moldova’s Jewish Community says it has already started work on restoring the cemetery and including it on a map of tourist sites dedicated to Jewish memory, raising questions about Filip’s own announced restoration work.
Some experts have questioned the government’s capacity to conduct such a sensitive project.
“I am afraid that, despite the good intentions, without real expertise and the right attitude towards historical heritage, a part of the cemetery will be destroyed for the simple reason that since it is already ruined, it would be easier to destroy than rehabilitate it,” said Irina Sihova, a researcher with the Cultural Heritage Institute of the Moldovan Academy of Science.
“It would be a huge mistake both historically and religiously.”
Sihova, who is also Jewish, often acts as a guide for Jews coming from all over the world to trace their roots in Moldova.
For such people, she said, cemeteries are an important genealogical resource.
“Unfortunately, Jewish cemeteries continue to be vandalised. Swastikas appear on graves, tombstones are destroyed or simply ruined over time. The cemetery in Chisinau is in a terrible state.”
The almost 50 Jewish cemeteries in Moldova, big and small, abandoned and preserved, speak to a once strong Jewish community in the country.
A long and complicated history
The Jewish presence in Moldova dates back centuries.
Their number grew after 1812 when what is now the Republic of Moldova was annexed by the Russian Empire and many Jews were relocated there.
But in 1903, Jews in Moldova received a foretaste of the horror to come when a pogrom in Chisinau saw the murder of 49 Jews and the rape and wounding of hundreds more.
According to historical estimates, in 1941, when Romania took control of the region during World War Two, between 45,000 and 60,000 Jews were executed and another 100,000 to 200,000 died in the ghettos and concentration camps of Transnistria, operated at the time by the Romanian and German armies.
Later, under the Soviet Union, 30,000 Jews left Moldova in the 1970s and 1980s, as part of a wave of Jewish migration from the Soviet Union to Israel. In the most recent Moldovan census, in 2014, just 1,600 people declared themselves as Jews.
“Moldova lost most of its Jewish population in the previous century, due to the Holocaust, the Communist repression and the emigration to Israel,” said Shomshon Daniel Izakson, Rabbi of the Jewish Community in Moldova.
“That is why, in a country where they represented one third of the population, Jews now account for less than one per cent of the population. One might think that Jews never lived here, but it is an important part of our history we should be aware of so that we can move forward,” he told BIRN.
Limited teaching
Moldova has officially condemned the Holocaust and taken steps to counter antisemitism.
In July 2016, the Moldovan parliament adopted a declaration acknowledging the Final Report of the Wiesel International Commission for the Study of Holocaust and in January 2017 the government approved the implementing norms.
The authorities also say they plan to review the content of school history textbooks to prepare the curriculum for an optional subject on the Holocaust, as well as identify the places where Jews and Roma were deported from or exterminated during World War Two and mark them with monuments and memorial plaques.
Currently, however, the education curriculum dedicates only one hour of learning to the Holocaust, in the 12th grade. More often than not, learning about the Holocaust comes down to the dedication of individual history teachers.
Likrat – an educational programme aimed to countering antisemitims and fostering tolerance among young people – was launched in Chisinau last year. Students of the two Jewish high-schools in Chisinau talk both about themselves and about Jewish history, culture and traditions to students from other schools.
Meaning “to come forward” in Hebrew, Likrat was launched by Yvette Merzbacher, a Jew born in Peru and now living in Switzerland, whose grandparents emigrated from Moldova almost a century ago.
“Dialogue – whether about religion or not – creates a beautiful energy. People open up and youth talk face to face,” Merzbacher told BIRN. „One can get together Romanians, Gagauz, Jews, Orthodox Christians and create a more tolerant society in which youth learn how to accept one another and live together peacefully.”
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