Vandalism
Broken tombstones at the Jewish cemetery in Khushi, Romania, April 2019
In 2013-2014, several acts of vandalism were recorded in Romania. For example, on February 9, 2013, the walls of a Jewish cemetery in Timisoara, Romania's third largest city, was desecrated with swastikas and slogans “Death to Jews!”
On May 17th a monument to Holocaust victims in Tirgu Mures was desecrated. On June 9, vandals broke windows of a synagogue in Ploiest.
In April 2019, a Jewish cemetery was attacked in Khushi, 340 kilometers from Bucharest. The scale of the destruction at the Khushi cemetery, which used to be home to a large Jewish community, makes the site one of the worst vandalism in Europe in recent years, with 73 headstones allowed in total. The scale of the vandalism is evidenced by the fact that the attack was brought to the attention of Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, who condemned the attack on a Jewish cemetery in Romania, saying that "Jewish hatred is still with us."
In June 2021, a synagogue in the Romanian city of Orestie was desecrated. This happened on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the Iasi pogrom, the brutal massacre of the Holocaust, during which more than 13,000 Jews were killed between June 29 and July 16, 1941. Romanian police have identified a group of minors accused of vandalizing a synagogue in southwestern Transylvania on the eve of the anniversary of the country's notorious Holocaust pogrom, Romanian daily Adevărul reported.
Vandals smashed the windows of the historic synagogue. The building was built in the late 1800s and is a historical monument. According to the European Jewish Congress, it was renovated in the early 2000s and is also used for exhibitions and as a cultural centre. The act of vandalism itself, which was reported by the newspaper Stirile Transilvaniei, was first noticed on Monday morning by archaeologists from the local Museum of Ethnography and Folk Art, who saw broken windows and found several medium-sized stones inside the synagogue.
At the beginning of January 2021, in the predominantly ethnic Hungarian city of Bacău (Bákó in Hungarian), a man was arrested for spraying black paint on Hungarian road signs. He was sentenced to six months in prison by the Odorheiu Secuiesc court. The signs marked the entry or exit from several ethnic Hungarian settlements in Secklerland. The attacker was charged only with vandalism, and inciting hatred was not included in the indictment.
