Romania to teach on holocaust

2003-09-17 16:58

Romania - Romania's culture minister urged his country on Wednesday to fully acknowledge its role in killing thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, an apparent attempt to heal relations with Israel.

"Romania participated in the Holocaust, and we have to face history," the minister, Razvan Teodorescu, said at a ceremony marking the inauguration of a teaching manual on the Holocaust.

Romania's traditionally good ties to Israel were strained in June after the government claimed there was no Holocaust inside Romania's borders. Romania was a German ally during most of World War II.

Israel and Romania's Jewish community protested, and the government eventually acknowledged that Romania's wartime leaders deported and killed Jews.

But tensions resurfaced in July when Romanian President Ion Iliescu was quoted by an Israeli paper as saying, "the Holocaust was not unique to the Jewish population in Europe. Many others, including Poles, died in the same way."

After Israel protested those remarks, Iliescu pledged to support Holocaust education in Romania and set up a memorial day to commemorate Holocaust victims. The new teaching manual comes as part of that effort.

"The barbarism of the Holocaust was unique in history and should not be repeated," Teodorescu said at the ceremony, which was attended by US and Israeli diplomats as well as several representatives from the Jewish community.

The book, called "Teaching the Holocaust in the 21st Century," was written by a French author and translated into Romanian.

During communist times, schoolbooks taught that Germans were the sole perpetrators of the Holocaust, ignoring the involvement of Romania's wartime leaders.

Since the fall of communism in 1989, schools have only slowly begun to address the issue of Romanian involvement in the atrocities.

Romania was home to 760 000 Jews before World War II. An estimated 420 000 were killed during the war. More than 20 000 Romanian Gypsies also died after being deported to camps.

Today, about 6 000 Jews live in Romania.

- SAPA