Moses Rosen - Leader of The Judaic Cult in Romania in The Years of Stalinism

Leader of The Judaic Cult in Romania in The Years of Stalinism

As leader of the "Mosaic" religious institutions, the rabbi Rosen was submitted to the control of the Communist authorities which ran in the years of fifties a very harsh policy against expressions of Jewish national feeling, especially the Zionism, the Hebrew culture and the Jewish religion. There was some tolerance, but more and more limited, to the culture in the Yiddish language. To oppose frontally the regime, which used then Stalinist terror methods would have attract cruel individual and collective repression and revenge measures.

After having been allowed on 1948, June 27 - July 6 to take part to the meeting of the World Jewish Congress in Montreux, Switzerland, following Moscow's directives, the Romanian communist regime disconnected totally the Jews of Romania from the other Jewish communities in the world for a period of 8 years. In those difficult circumstances only remained active the diplomatic mission in Bucharest of the newly founded Jewish state of Israel.

In 1948 the Rabbinical Council of Romanian Jews led by Moses Rosen was coerced to sign a declaration of condemnation of the so-called "Zionist activity" of the former chief rabbi Dr Alexandru Şafran, who meanwhile was elected chief rabbi of Geneva. Nevertheless, despite his formal membership in the Jewish Democratic Committee, Moses Rosen tried to keep a distance from the policy of the leaders of the Committee (Bercu Feldman, H. Leibovici-Şerban, Israel Bacalu etc.) who desired to encourage a Jewish secular culture in Yiddish on account of the Hebrew religious and secular one, this from positions near to the ideology of the Communist regime. The reserved attitude of Moses Rosen vis a vis the political and cultural line of the Jewish Democratic Committee proved to be a right diplomacy. In March 1953, the regime, again inspired by Moscow, decided to rid itself from the Committee and led to its "voluntary" dissolution. The press organ of the Committee, "Unirea" was closed.

After Stalin's death and later, after the beginning of de-Stalinization in USSR, the Communist authorities in Romania decided to use the good offices of the leaderships of the different religious cults in Romania, including those of religious minorities, in order to improve their image in the world and to improve the economic relations of Romania with the foreign countries.

In 1956, the same year when many of the Zionist activists were freed from the Romanian prisons, the authorities allowed to Rabbi Rosen to took part again to Jewish meetings and conferences abroad. The first occasion was the contacts with the Chief Rabbi of Sweden, Kurt Wilhelm. The same year in October 1956 Rosen was authorized to found the "Revista Cultului Mozaic" (The Mosaic Cult Review), official press organ of the Romanian Jewry in Romanian, published in Romanian, Yiddish and Hebrew. With its last one page in Hebrew it was for more than thirty years the sole journal in Hebrew printed in all the communist world. The prestigious scholar Ezra Fleischer former Prisoner of Zion in the Romanian prisons, and Israel Prize winner, before its emigration to Israel. was one of the first editors of the journal,

Since 1957, Dr Rosen, following a renewed tradition existing during the pre-Fascist epoch—was elected member of the Romanian Parliament, representing a Bucharest constituency (then still with a rather large Jewish population).