Reference Type: Book Section
Author: Kuller, Harry
Year: 2010
Title: Intelighenţia evreiască în anii comunismului local. Consideraţii preliminare şi studiu de caz
Translated Title: [Jewish Intelligentsia during the Communist Regime in Romania. Preliminary Considerations and Case Study]
Editor: Crăciun, Camelia - Vasiliu, Gabriela - Rotman, Liviu
Book Title: Noi perspective în istoriografia evreilor din România
City: Bucureşti
Publisher: Hasefer
Pages: 168-191
Language: Romanian
Keywords: Jewish minority, history, communist era, intellectuals, bibliography, scholars, Communist Party, employment, integration, education, stereotype
Abstract: (En) This work, which later developed into a study named The Jewish Intelligentsia during the Period of the Local Communist Regime, continues the interest of the author in showing the dynamics of the various segments of Romanian Jews during the communist period. The introduction of the survey underlines the constraints faced by the Jewish Intelligentsia, as well as the rest of the local intellectuals during the four decades of communist regime. Apart from the "documents of terror" that were taken over by historians for the description of that age (state security files, minutes of the trials, descriptions of the detention etc.) the author reveals the usefulness of a different type of document: the so-called personnel file, which presents the "triviality" of less tough constraints. Still, they were used to influence the professional life and existence of very large categories of people, including Jews. Many pieces of information from these files explain why so many Jews (over 95%) opted to leave Romania and made Aliyah en masse - first in the 1950s, then in the 60s and 70s. This work also refers to what happened to them until they emigrated. Still, it is only fair to admit that the period between the 1950s and 1970s witnessed a series of favorable conditions for the socio-professional and cultural mobility of Jewish intellectuals. This provided a horizon of honest integration, even without serious concessions made to the regime. Jewish youngsters were able to train and be active in various professional fields useful to the country‟s economy and culture. In time, they were integrated into the economic management, the technical and medical research fields, the university educational system and academic institutes, into various areas of scientific, literary and artistic creation. More than two-fifths of all Romanian Jewish intellectuals were educated and active after the Second World War. The survey also includes two lists of the most important Jewish party activists - fanatical communists and opportunists, whose individual guilt for having supported the regime cannot possibly justify the anti-Semitic allegation that it was the Jews who brought communism to Romania and it was they who were the first beneficiaries of the regime.
URL: http://www.csier.jewishfed.ro/public_html/documente/noiperspective.pdf