Reuters, April 25, 2000, and RFE/RL Newsline, April 26, 2000.

Romanian Jewish community leaders urged the country’s authorities to take action against a local World War II fascist movement revived after the fall of communism ten years earlier. The Federation of Romanian Jewish Communities, in a letter to President Emil Constantinescu, the government, and the parliament, protested the revival of the fascist Legionary Movement — the successor to the Iron Guard, whose predecessors briefly ruled Romania during World War II and led violent pogroms in which thousands of Romanian Jews were killed.

“By claiming to be a cultural grouping, today’s Legionaries are seeking to avoid the law on political parties,” the Jewish leaders wrote, noting that post-communist legislation bans the creation of fascist and extremist parties. The letter cited a report by the Romanian Intelligence Service, the country’s main espionage agency, describing the Legionaries as grouped into twelve foundations and associations that “openly preach violence and political assassination.” It invoked the post-communist 1991 constitution, which bans racism and extreme nationalism, and urged authorities to ban the movement, which the letter said was actively recruiting among young people.

“Profoundly anti-democratic, totalitarian, xenophobic, anti-Semitic and with a past of political assassination, the Legionary Movement is an open threat to democracy in Romania,” the letter stated. The Legionary movement, led by a former physics teacher named Șerban Suru, claimed a few hundred adherents nationwide.

Half of Romania’s 800,000 Jews perished in the Nazi Holocaust; most of the survivors emigrated to Israel or the United States after the war, leaving a community that had by 2000 dwindled to only 14,000, most of them elderly. Anti-Semitic graffiti — swastikas, sometimes accompanied by anti-Semitic slogans — had by this time become a recurring sight on buildings in central Bucharest, and Jewish leaders reported repeated acts of vandalism at Jewish cemeteries around the country.