Bucharest Diary

Romania's Journey from Darkness to Light

Moses

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780815732730
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An insider's account of Romania's emergence from communism control

In the 1970s American attorney Alfred H. Moses was approached on the streets of Bucharest by young Jews seeking help to emigrate to Israel. This became the author's mission until the communist regime fell in 1989. Before that Moses had met periodically with Romania's communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, to persuade him to allow increased Jewish emigration. This experience deepened Moses's interest in Romania—an interest that culminated in his serving as U.S. ambassador to the country from 1994 to 1997 during the Clinton administration.

The ambassador's time of service in Romania came just a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. During this period Romania faced economic paralysis and was still buried in the rubble of communism. Over the next three years Moses helped nurture Romania's nascent democratic institutions, promoted privatization of Romania's economy, and shepherded Romania on the path toward full integration with Western institutions. Through frequent press conferences, speeches, and writings in the Romanian and Western press and in his meetings with Romanian officials at the highest level, he stated in plain language the steps Romania needed to take before it could be accepted in the West as a free and democratic country.

Bucharest Diary: An American Ambassador's Journey is filled with firsthand stories, including colorful anecdotes, of the diplomacy, both public and private, that helped Romania recover from four decades of communist rule and, eventually, become a member of both NATO and the European Union. Romania still struggles today with the consequences of its history, but it has reached many of its post-communist goals, which Ambassador Moses championed at a crucial time.

This book will be of special interest to readers of history and public affairs—in particular those interested in Jewish life under communist rule in Eastern Europe and how the United States and its Western partners helped rebuild an important country devastated by communism.

PART ONE

My Introduction to Romania

1

Ceauşescu, Romania’s Jews, Chief Rabbi Rosen, and Me

MY FIRST YEARS IN ROMANIA, 1976–1989

In early 1976 I received a phone call from New York asking me to lead an American Jewish Committee delegation to Bucharest in late February. I immediately said yes. I was on the AJC’s National Board. As far as I knew, none of my ancestors had ever set foot in Romania, yet the country had always fascinated me. I remembered reading about Romania’s joining Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in World War II. In college, I read about the Congress of Berlin, where in 1878 the Great Powers recognized Romania’s independence from the Ottoman Empire.

I also read about Romania’s role in the slow unraveling of the European order after the Congress of Berlin, its defeat by Germany in the Great War (World War I), and its triumphal return to the war on the Allies’ side a few days before the Armistice was signed in Versailles in November 1918. I even had a vague picture in my head of what Bucharest, Romania’s capital, looked like. I knew that Romanians called it the Paris of the East, and that in reality it was shabby and decadent compared to the City of Light on the Seine. For whatever reason, shabby, decadent Bucharest appealed to me. Maybe it was the allure of the unknown or a romantic notion of life in a distant spot on the globe about which I knew almost nothing.

Reality hit me when my wife, Carol, and I boarded a Tarom Airlines (the Romanian national airline) flight from Greece to Romania in late February 1976. I was moving into the unknown, and the plane didn’t look any too air-worthy, but we landed safely in Bucharest. Once inside the terminal, we entered another world. There was an air of harshness mixed with corruption and melancholy so pervasive you could feel it. In the airport, the metal detectors did not work and the baggage conveyor was broken. Our luggage was tossed onto creaky cardboard tables by disgruntled, unshaven airport workers in dirty overalls. Corruption was on open display wherever we looked—jostling by airport attendants, customs officials searching for contraband to seize and probably sell on the black market.

Outside the airport, the sense of desolation grew deeper, with hushed conversations on street corners, bugged hotel rooms, paid informers, and soldiers lolling about smoking cigarettes and asking for “gifts.” The streets were dimly lit to save energy in a near-bankrupt country. Room temperatures were bone-chilling.

We stayed at Bucharest’s once fabled Athenee Palace Hotel, its pre–World War II grandeur faded almost beyond recognition. When Carol and I exited the elevator the next morning, we saw middle-aged and older women on their hands and knees scrubbing the badly scuffed lobby floors. Carol firmly pronounced, “I am never coming back here.” Neither of us could have imagined that eighteen years later I would return to Romania as the U.S. ambassador.

Over the next few days we saw much of Bucharest, but our principal focus was on the city’s Jewish community. Before the war it had numbered some 100,000; now that number was down to about 20,000, mostly elderly. Our first stop was at the Jewish Federation’s offices adjoining the Choral Synagogue, a short distance from the hotel. The synagogue, built in the late 1800s, was the historic seat of Romania’s chief rabbi.

Although it was February, the synagogue, like most buildings in Bucharest, was unheated. Despite its being without heat and badly in need of repair, the building’s faded beauty and great dignity were there to see. Looking at the bema with the “eternal light” flickering over the Torah scrolls and the familiar Hebrew inscription above it, I felt at home. There is a sameness to traditional synagogues that is familiar and welcoming to those of us raised in Jewish homes. Memories and feelings travel with us, even when hidden beneath the surface. They are rekindled on occasions like this, visiting a once magnificent synagogue.

The federation offices were in a yellow stucco two-story building across a narrow cobblestone driveway from the synagogue. There we were met by a delegation of community leaders carrying flowers and the traditional Romanian gift of greeting, a large beautiful twisted loaf of bread and salt. The delegation immediately apologized for the absence of Chief Rabbi Moses Rosen, who at that time was out of the country on his annual visit, with his wife, to a kosher hotel in Switzerland. It was clear from words and tone that Rabbi Rosen was the real power in this Jewish community, both venerated and feared. I would meet Rabbi Rosen for the first time a few years later when I returned to Bucharest to take up with Ceauşescu the cause of Romanian Jewry, which by then had become my cause as well. The Jewish community leaders did their best to explain how the highly organized Jewish community functioned under Rabbi Rosen’s direction. Much of what we heard was oft-rehearsed, exaggerated rhetoric intended to impress foreign visitors with the vibrancy of the community and the religiosity of its members. We were told there were functioning synagogues throughout Romania, kosher kitchens, Talmud torahs (schools), a Jewish-Yiddish theater, and more.

In truth, the description was more like a Potemkin village than reality. Jewish life was literally dying out. Most Jews were Jewishly illiterate. Older Jews could read and speak Yiddish but not Hebrew. Their recitation of the Jewish prayers was by rote; few of them could actually understand the Hebrew prayers. Younger Jews knew even less. The Jewish community was principally supported by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—the Joint, for short—which each year contributed about $2 million, a major share of the community’s total budget, and helped the dwindling Jewish population survive.

The rest of the day was given over to visiting the Jewish Community Center a few blocks from the Choral Synagogue, followed by shorter stops at two other synagogues. One was the Sephardic Synagogue, now largely a museum with pictures of the slaughter of Romanian Jews by the Nazis and Romanian fascists in the early 1940s. The other was the dark, dank “Great Synagogue,” no longer used for daily services but housing a small Jewish preschool. Already feeling gloomy, we moved on to the Jewish community’s old-age home, where many Holocaust survivors lived, barely able to talk or get about without help. From what we could tell, the staff was kind and caring, but the facilities were old and woefully inadequate.

When not walking around Bucharest, our mode of transportation was an old bus that coughed and chugged but somehow managed to get us where we were supposed to be eventually. February was not the ideal month to be in Bucharest, particularly, as in our case, after a heavy snowfall. Phalanxes of men and women in office clothes were on the streets shoveling snow. Our Romanian guide explained to us that they were “volunteers” doing their patriotic duty on behalf of the Socialist Republic of Romania. These poor souls, dragooned from their offices, had to shovel snow in the bitter cold.

Bucharest in 1976 was caught in a time warp that began in the nineteenth century and ended in the late 1930s. Horse-drawn carts were commonplace on the cobblestone streets. Other modes of transportation were equally dated—rattling, coughing old trucks, underpowered Romanian-made Dacia automobiles, and an occasional foreign car that looked out of place. Bucharest’s once handsome buildings were in disrepair, with peeling paint on the outside and rotting wood protruding through openings. In the streets, no one said hello or acknowledged our presence but instead averted their gaze. Gray skies added to the gloom, as did the ever-present smog from coal-burning furnaces that cast a permanent yellow haze over the city. One could smell the smog as well as see it.

Then something unexpected happened that would forever tie me to Romania. Three young Jewish boys in their teens approached Carol and me on the sidewalk outside our hotel. With downcast eyes, one of them asked me in English if I was American. When I said yes, he asked if I was Jewish. When I again answered yes, he blurted out, “Don’t believe what they tell you. The situation here is terrible, especially for Jews. We are blamed for everything that goes wrong. Help us get out. There is no future for Jews in Romania. Everything you hear is a lie, a lie, a lie.” From that moment on, I was hooked. Over the next thirteen years I built a cottage industry in the United States with one goal—getting Romania’s dwindling Jewish community out of Romania.

It is hard for people in the West, even Jews living today, to understand what it was like to be a Jew in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Eastern Europe. Jews were a community apart, living together in small Jewish communities, shtetls, and later in largely Jewish cities or parts of cities with their own community leaders and sometimes their own police and tax collectors. Eastern Europe was not a melting pot for Jews. Jews in Romania lived like their fellow Jews in neighboring Ukraine, Galicia (Poland), and Russia. Before World War II, they numbered 800,000, more than 4 percent of the population (less than 2 percent of the U.S. population is Jewish). They were lower-middle-class artisans, metalworkers, tailors, and shopkeepers. After the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and the slow lifting of restrictions on Jews, they entered the liberal professions—law and medicine—primarily in Bucharest and larger Romanian cities. Romania’s original Jews came from Poland; later, Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal came to Romania. There were still Sephardic—Spanish-Portuguese—synagogues in Romania when I arrived in the 1970s that traced their ancestry to Jewish communities on the Iberian Peninsula. Other Jews in Romania may have been descended from the Khazars, a nomadic Turkic people living in what is today Kazakhstan, who converted en masse to Judaism in the ninth or tenth century. The region was overrun by the Mongols in the thirteenth century.

A rich culture surrounded Jewish life in Romania. The Yiddish theater began in Romania, and even in my day a large number of chazanim, cantors, in the United States were born in Romania. Maybe the fusion of Roma gypsy music with Jewish liturgical melodies accounted for the profusion of Jewish music in Romania. But unlike their coreligionists elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Romanian Jewry did not produce great scholars, writers, nor even notable Jewish lay leaders. The establishment of famous yeshivas, religious schools, in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, and Ukraine did not occur in Romania. This led Jews elsewhere to consider Romanian Jews a Jewishly uneducated, backwater society, left behind by the wave of modernity that swept over Europe.

After World War II, most Romanian Jews emigrated to Israel, in all about 400,000. This began immediately after the war, when Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and fascist Romania left in waves for the soon-to-be Jewish state of Israel, later entering the country under Israel’s “right of return,” which applied to Jews worldwide. Another large wave of Romanian Jews left for Israel in the early 1960s; after that, a slow trickle followed each year.

Israel was closer and easier to get to than the United States and did not require an immigration visa. Moreover, applying for a U.S. visa was time-consuming, with an uncertain outcome. As a political matter, Romania’s communist regime rationalized that Jews emigrating to Israel were “returning” to their historic homeland. This was less of a black eye for Romania’s communist leaders than Jewish emigration to a Western country, especially the United States. Romanian Jews had been among the early Zionists who emigrated to Palestine more than a hundred years before.

When I visited Romania with two of our daughters in the early 1980s, we saw synagogues in Moldavia (one of Romania’s two historic principalities that at one time had a large Jewish population) with primitive hand-painted art depicting biblical scenes in ancient Israel as imagined by the artists. As Rabbi Rosen liked to say, “Our Jews go to Israel, not Philadelphia.” It was true then and continues to be true today.

JEWISH EMIGRATION FROM ROMANIA TO ISRAEL: A COMPLEX COLLABORATION

Over time, I became the point person in the United States for Romanian Jewish emigration—not that there was much competition. I eventually built a network among American Jewish organizations, members of Congress, and the executive branch. I spoke not only for myself but also on behalf of the American Jewish Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (Conference of Presidents), the umbrella organization that was then comprised of some thirty or so organizations but now has many more.

Other Jewish organizations helped, particularly B’nai B’rith International. We worked together meeting with senators and officials in the White House and the State and Commerce Departments, interceding with the Romanian ambassador in Washington and, on three occasions, directly with Ceauşescu and his ministers. Over those thirteen years, the Carter, Reagan, and Bush administrations supported our efforts, as did the American embassy in Bucharest.

In the Senate, Senators Adlai Stevenson III (D-Ill.) and John Danforth (R-Mo.) were particularly helpful. The Israeli government also pitched in, but I had no idea at the time that it was paying Romania a flat fee for each Jew allowed to emigrate to Israel. I did not learn about the Israeli payments until I read Radu Ioanid’s book, The Ransom of the Jews: The Story of the Extraordinary Secret Bargain between Romania and Israel, published in 2005. (Ioanid is the archival director at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.) I later learned that the Federal Republic of Germany paid a head tax to Ceauşescu as well to allow German nationals to emigrate from Romania to West Germany.

Ceauşescu allowed people like Rabbi Rosen to travel abroad with the implicit understanding that they would not use their freedom to criticize Romania. By the time I arrived on the scene, Israel’s Romanian efforts were coordinated by Nehemiah Levanon, in the prime minister’s office. I met with Levanon in my Washington office in 1979 in what turned out to be an unpleasant few hours. Neither then nor later did he or any other Israeli official clue me in on the secret Israeli payments. In effect, Ceauşescu was collecting at both ends for the same thing—cash from Israelis and trade benefits from the United States. I blame the Israelis as much as Ceauşescu, first, for not telling me, and second, for paying a head tax for nothing. Our group in the United States had the muscle to get Jews out, and we did.

Our leverage was most favored nation (MFN) trade status for Romania, which came up each year for renewal in the U.S. Congress. Under the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to the 1974 trade law, which governed U.S. trade relations with communist countries, the president was required to review Romania’s MFN status annually. If the administration recommended renewal, it became law unless Congress voted to reject it. In some years the House of Representatives passed legislation rejecting MFN status for Romania, but the Senate did not concur. My and my colleagues’ efforts were focused on the Senate.

The Ford administration first recommended MFN status for Romania in 1975, largely in recognition of Romania’s acts of independence from the Soviet Union in some aspects of foreign policy. For example, Ceauşescu continued diplomatic relations with Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War when the Soviet Union and the rest of the communist world broke off relations. A year later he denounced the Red Army’s crushing of the Prague Spring and kept Romania’s military out of the Warsaw Pact High Command.

Ceauşescu also tweaked the nose of Soviet leaders in the Kremlin by periodically visiting China, where he was welcomed with lavish displays of friendship fit for a true world leader, far exceeding Ceauşescu’s relative insignificance on the world stage. Ceauşescu was an unintended beneficiary of the Sino-Soviet conflict. The Chinese poured on the flattery as a way of showing that the Soviet Union was not the world’s only communist power. In Peking, Ceauşescu met with the ...