Jews of Romania and The Disgusting Vlad III-Dracula of 15th Century

 Nadene Goldfoot

Bea Etlinger was the life of any party. She was a born entertainer, singing and dancing, getting people to laugh.   She helped my mother make pastry items for my brother's Bar Mitzvah.  Why did her husband, Max, leave Romania?  It's a country outside the Pale of Settlement.  Max was born in Poland but it was his wife, Adele, that was from Romania.  They had 2 sons born in Romania.  They came to the USA and children were born in NY and Oregon.  Bea was born in Austria.  They lived on SW 2nd & Arthur, a neighborhood mainly of Jews and Italians in 1950 near my Bubbe. I was friends with their 2 children, Joel and Joan.    

Research finds that Jews have lived there since the 4th Century.  The city of Roman in 1391 were first settled by Jews.  By the end of the 16th century several Jewish communities existed when Joseph Nasi and Solomon Ashkenazi played a part in the history of this area.

On Netflix is the series on the Ottoman Empire which includes a lot about the Impaler, Vlad III, Dracula of Romania (1428-1476).  He is often considered one of the most important rulers in Wallachian history and a national hero of Romania. Wallachia is  a historical and geographical region of Romania. When it dropped on Netflix back in 2020, Rise Of Empires: Ottoman delivered a concise and interesting account of the Ottoman Empire and Mehmed II’s conquering of the world. 

             Vlad Dracula III  With the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power, this second season moves into murky military waters, depicting the war between Mehmed’s Ottoman Empire and Vlad the Impaler’s Wallachian forces. 

 How Romania can consider Vlad Dracula a hero is terrible;  he was the 2nd worst vicious killer in history (Hitler being 1st) , impaling thousands of men and women on stakes.   Vlad III-Dracula,  earned his fearsome nickname for impaling more than 20,000 people and killing as many as 60,000 others during his bloody reign. He was even said to dine among his impaled enemies and dip his bread in their blood.

This region was first dominated by Hungary, but in 1330 it fell under Ottoman influence. A number of Jews expelled from Hungary in the mid-fifteenth century settled on the Wallachian slopes of the Carpathians, and were followed, after 1492, by those expelled from Spain by that country’s Catholic monarchs. Warmly received in regions controlled by the sultan (the Mediterranean shores and the Balkans) and the Wallachian princes, who encouraged trade, Jews in the late fifteenth century nonetheless fell victim to the cruelty of Vlad the Impaler, better known by the name of Dracula. 

Jews suffered greatly from both sides in the various Russo-Turkish (meaning Ottoman Empire)  wars taking place in Romania between 1769 and 1812.  

More than 70,000 Jews left Romania from 1900-1906, most probably coming to USA.  By 1937 when things were so bad for Jews in Germany, Octavian Goga of the National Christian Party led a series of decrees depriving the Jews of citizenship, their Hebrew and Yiddish Press,  and the opportunity to practice their professions.  Then massacres of Jews took place in 1940 because of their own copycat ordinances of the Nuremberg Laws against Jews.  800,000 Jews were affected by 1939.  385,000 were exterminated, slaughtered  before liberation.  That's almost half of their Jewish population.  125,000 left for Israel.  

Romanian Jews who were assembled in a Bessarabian village in September 1941 before deportation to Transnistria.  Transnistria, officially the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (PMR), is an unrecognised breakaway state that is internationally recognised as a part of Moldova.   Bessarabia forms the southwestern corner of 

Ukraine, lying between the Rivers Dniester and Danube, with 

Moldova to the north and Romania to the west. It was ruled 

first by the Ottoman Empire, then by a succession of 

Romanian, Russian, and Soviet overlords.

 Despite Jewish participation in both the war for Romania’s independence and the First World War alongside the Allies (1916-18), civil equality and respect for the minority rights of Jews were not granted until later, by the 1923 constitution. In that era, large Magyar-speaking Jewish populations from Transylvania, German-speaking ones from Bukovina, and Yiddish or Russian-speaking ones from Bessarabia were all united within Greater Romania by the Treaty of Versailles. Fifteen years later, these gains were jeopardized by the anti-Semitic legislation of the Goza-Cuza government. 

Jewish women at forced labor in the process of clearing rubble from the main street. Kishinev, Bessarabia, Romania, August 12, 1941.

The country dismemberment, which began in the summer of 1940, combined with its entrance into war on Hitler’s side against the Soviet Union and then, after defeat, the installation of a hard-line Communist government here, ultimately sounded the death knell for Romanian Judaism.

The largest irony is that Romania was the only East European country that had relations with Israel after the Six Day War of June 1967.  They took on ties with Israel economically and diplomatic.  By 1991, less than 20,000 Jews remained in Romania.  

Update 1/29/2023

Resource:

https://jguideeurope.org/en/region/romania/wallachia/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_Impaler