The facts:
A rocket was launched to signal the start. The rocket’s flare had not faded before death and destruction was visited upon everyJewish district in the city. The attacks had been timed to coincide with the movement of Romanian and German troops toward the Russian front.
“The Jews are firing on the Romanian Army!”
The troops, who had been moving silently forward, suddenly started firing at the houses from which they believed they were being attacked. Panic broke out.
A “thorough” investigation was ordered into the shooting of the troops. Though not a single soldier was found to have been killed or wounded, Jews were randomly arrested throughout the night and taken to a number of collection centers – most of them to police headquarters.
Jews were dragged from their homes, from their beds, from their families, and brought to the courtyard of police headquarters. By dawn on that Sabbath morning, more than two thousand Jews had been rounded up. By noon, the number was six thousand.
June 29, 1941. Duminica Aceia. That Sunday. The bloodiest day in the history of the Jews of Romania.
With the mass of Jews corralled into the courtyard of police headquarters, soldiers opened fire, killing several hundred even as other soldiers beat individual Jews to death.
Did the wails of the defenseless victims elicit the slightest bit of mercy in the hearts of the soldiers? No. Their hearts were closed to the cries of the innocents.
Not just the soldiers. The community had exploded in an outburst of hatred and evil. Even as the massacre was taking place at police headquarters, a pogrom raged like a wildfire throughout the city, striking terror in every Jewish home.
Some 12,000 Jews were arrested and shot outside police headquarters. Some 4,300 more were stuffed into closed cargo vans and cattle cars. Some 2,650 died of thirst or suffocation. It could be argued that those who perished were the lucky ones. The survivors suffered excessive physical and mental trauma that would torment them throughout their lives.
So began the Romanian chapter of Hitler’s Final Solution.
I.C. Butnaru, in The Silent Holocaust, records that during a cabinet session on July 8, 1941, Antonescu proclaimed that his government’s policy regarding the Jews did not trouble him: “It makes no difference to me that ‘we’ll go down in history as barbarian.’ The Roman Empire performed a series of acts of barbarism according to our present standards, and nevertheless it was the most magnificent political establishment. There has not existed a more favorable moment in our history. If it is needed, shoot all of them with machine guns.”
The savagery was so brutal that even Hans Frank, the German governor general of Poland, seemed to view the Iasi massacre with some distaste. “Has anyone ever seen a massacre of Jews in the streets of a German town? We use the art of surgery, not of butchery!”
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What does the spiritual leader of a community so horribly violated do? What does he say? What is the response to an attack so vicious that even a monster like Hans Frank refers to it as “butchery”?
Only the pure flame of God’s truth could burn true in the face of such horror.
Only God’s strength could remain unbowed.
They said that when my father spoke, taught and lectured, flames of fire spewed forth his energy and dynamism. Many who had heard my father teach told me, “Whether there were three students in class or five hundred in a lecture hall, when your father taught, it was the same ma’amad Har Sinai – the same revelation at Sinai, as if sitting at the feet of a prophet” – nurtured and developed in the fires of destruction that came upon his community.
My father, elected chief rabbi of Iasi at the age of twenty-seven, had witnessed the fires of Hell burn his people. How could he rehabilitate his own life, let alone the life of his community? How does the leader of a community see its destruction wrought in such brutal, unspeakable ways and go on? How does he lead? How does he even dream of renewal?
In his “Masa Hamavet,” Dr. Manfred Reifer, writing about Iasi, notes that “the community’s leadership, headed by its president, Yosef Jakob, and Chief Rabbi, Dr. Joseph Safran, soon turned its focus to heal its community’s wounds which was so severely hit with the slaughter of its sons. First and foremost was the need to establish social aid and support that would extend assistance to over twenty thousand widows and orphans. Even more difficult was the crisis of Jewish schooling.”
