The Simon Wiesenthal Center appealed this week to President Maia Sandu of Moldova to remove two monuments that honor Romanian antisemites and Nazi collaborators.
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In a letter to Sandu, the center's Director for Eastern European Affairs, Holocaust historian Dr. Efraim Zuroff appealed to take the necessary steps to remove the offensive monuments.
In Chisinau for example, in the Alley of Classics, a statue was recently unveiled of former Romanian Prime Minister Octavian Goga.
Goga, who was in power during WWII, was a notorious antisemite who enacted laws stripping one-third of Romanian Jewry of their citizenship and was the co-founder of the National Christian Party, which had a swastika on its logo and engaged in ant-Semitic violence.
A second monument is located in Valea Morilor Park as part of a larger memorial, partially funded by the Romanian government to commemorate the "liberation" of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina by the Romanian Army. But that Romanian "victory" led to the mass murder of 150,000 Bessarabian Jews within one month and the subsequent ghettoization of the remaining Jews, which had lethal consequences. In 1939, Bessarabia had 205,000 Jews and in May 1942, only 227 Jews remained alive.
