By Calin Neacsu. March 15, 2000.

The Romanian city of Timișoara, cradle of the country’s 1989 revolution, has long been known as a model of inter-ethnic harmony in a fractious region.

But its exemplary role is being threatened by the rise of anti-Semitism, which local Jews link to the rise of the far-right in nearby Austria.

“Since the end of World War II our city has been spared. But recently anti-Semitic graffiti have started appearing around the city centre,” lamented Timișoara’s chief rabbi, Ernest Neumann.

“I associate this phenomenon notably with the rise of the far-right in Austria, which has given local hotheads more confidence,” he added in an interview with AFP.

Timișoara, known as “Little Vienna” for its Austro-Hungarian architecture and cosmopolitan feel, lies in the far west of this impoverished country, barely an hour’s drive from the Hungarian and Serbian borders.

While ethnic strife has wracked the region, the city has prided itself on the way Romanians, Serbs, Jews, Roma, Hungarians, Germans and Croats live together.

But the tolerant air of the city has been marred by the appearance in recent days of graffiti scrawled in Romanian, English and German on walls and buildings around the old town centre.

Neumann welcomed the fact that local authorities have been quick to clean up the inscriptions, while other religious and political leaders have condemned the new trend.

The graffiti apparently reflect the growing confidence of the far-right in Romania, which has MPs in parliament but whose supporters have until now refrained from expressing their xenophobic and anti-Semitic ideas publicly.

For Timișoara’s Jews, it is particularly worrying.

During the Holocaust, when Romanian Jews were suffering atrocities at the hands of the pro-Nazi regime of Marshal Ion Antonescu in Bucharest, the city was seen as a Jewish haven.

“We had 12,000 members at the start of the war. There were still 12,000 at the end,” says Neumann, noting that while being forced to comply with anti-Semitic laws, the city’s Jews did not have to wear the Star of David.

“During the war all the other communities showed solidarity with the Jews,” he said. Today “we live like brothers with the Orthodox church followers, Catholics, reformists and Greek-Catholics,” said the rabbi.

Ecumenical services are regularly held in the city’s churches, synagogues and mosques, attended by all communities.

In a symbol of Timișoara’s inter-religious harmony, the city’s Orthodox archbishop, Nicolae Corneanu, has since 1990 returned almost all the churches confiscated under communism from Greek Catholics.

Hope remains too of returning belongings looted from Jews by the communists. “The process is advancing slowly, but it is advancing,” says Neumann.

Above all, hope is fueled by the city’s long-standing multi-culturalism. “Our city is Europe,” said Levente, a young man who describes himself as Romanian, born of a Croatian father and Hungarian mother.

“In Timișoara most people are multi-lingual, because we learn foreign languages as children by playing with our neighbours,” he added.

“With its economic dynamism and above all its fantastic solidarity between communities, Timișoara embodies a modern Romania,” said one European businessman visiting the city.

But he said: “To succeed its inhabitants have to unite against all forms of extremism.”

© 2000 Agence France Presse.