Holocaust museum to Romania: Scrap 'racist' coin
A special coin issued by Romania's central bank to commemorate a prime minister and religious leader who stripped Jews of their citizenship before World War II has drawn protests from Romanian Jews as well as a director at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Associated Press reports.
Radu Ioanid, who runs the museum's international archives, said he was "shocked" by the bank's decision to mint the coin depicting late Patriarch Miron Cristea, who led the Romanian Orthodox Church from 1925 to 1939 and was prime minister from 1938 to 1939.
The patriarch was responsible for revising the citizenship law, stripping about 225,000 Jews — or 37 percent of the Jewish population — of their Romanian citizenship, Ioanid said.
"I can't understand how the patriarch managed to pass through the filter," said Robert Schwartz, representative for Romanian Jews in the city of Cluj. "It is known there are black stains connected to his attitude towards the Jews." Schwartz said there were other Romanians, such as the patriarch's contemporary Queen Maria, who had done much for Jews and should have been honored.
National Bank of Romania spokesman Mugur Stet said the coin was part of a collectors' series of five silver-minted coins memorializing the five patriarchs who have headed the Romanian Orthodox Church since 1925.
Some 300,000 Jews and Gypsies were killed in Romania during the Holocaust. Today, the country has only 6,000 Jews.
Comments
Passed through the filter by mistake? Golly! We shouldn't be surprised I suppose. Human beings lack historical memory and collective memory is being shredded by fractionation of countries and cities into so many factions of disagreeing and disagreeable people. I am not too sure there are many people in Romania--particularly young people--who remember their shameful past or who actually care that this past is being venerated inadvertently via a controversial coin. Like the statue to Roger B Taney in Maryland--the worst in human behavior sometimes can be placed on a pedestal and the exaltation can be explained away by saying that the person so exalted also did a lot of good and was too complex to place in a box titled "Bad". Believe me, there will be enough people to jump out of obscurity to defend Patriarch Miron Cristea and lay out his redeeming features for us. It is intriguing that only 37% of the Jewish population was stripped of its
citizenship. Why not all of them? How were the victims chosen? Why did the others escape the awful fate of being stripped of their citizenship? I am going to research the answers to these questions. Was it anti-Semetism or ignorance that led to the release of this coin? I am sure ignorance plays a large role in these insensitivities.
R Anon 1
Posted by: Anonymous | August 3, 2010 10:39 AM