Jews and Germans in Eastern Europe by Tobias Grill

Author:Tobias Grill [Grill, Tobias]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783110489774
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2018-09-24T00:00:00+00:00

Minority Resistance against the Politics of Romanization

The state of siege, existing until 1928, made public criticism difficult for non-Romanians through censorship and assembly bans. Disputes over language was fiercest at the schools. Romanian schools advanced at the expense of schools for other ethnic groups.728 Further, the Ministry of Education ordered that Jews must send their children to Romanian schools. Jewish and German deputies alike protested against this order. The majority of Jews in the Bukovina spoke Yiddish or German in the household, and did not want to subject their children to another language in primary school. The German deputy Alfred Kohlruß demanded that the autonomy of education, which had been guaranteed in 1918, be maintained. The prescriptions were only changed marginally. All teachers had to pass a test in the Romanian language, and were removed from civil service if their knowledge was deemed insufficient. The Jews reacted robustly, when, in December 1925, the minister of education prescribed the Romanian language for private schools as well. Salo Weisselberger, from Czernowitz, criticized the decree in the Senate, the Upper Chamber of the parliament.729 Jews from Romania also lodged complaints to the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris, which forwarded their protest to the League of Nations.730

As of 1926, external examiners were brought to conduct final examination tests in secondary state schools. These external examiners failed large numbers of high school students based on poor knowledge of Romanian. When disappointed Jewish pupils took a nationalist Romanian examiner to task, they were arrested. At the court proceedings, a Romanian right-wing extremist shot a defendant student in front of the court-house. In addition to Jews, there were also Germans in solidarity at the victim’s funeral. Jewish, German and Ukrainian deputies protested together against the measures of Romanization, citing their contribution to the escalation of ethnic violence. However, these protests were shouted down by nationalist Romanians in parliament. When the Jewish deputy Manfred Reifer was assaulted, his Ukrainian colleague from the Bukovina, and some social democrats, protected him. Jews and Germans were particularly appalled by the Minister of Interior, Octavian Goga, who called the shooting of the Jewish high-school student “a defense of Romanian honor.” The murderer was subsequently cleared by a jury in court.731

The social democrats in the Bukovina were an important link between the five ethnicities their members were recruited from. They were influential until October 1920, when the government violently crushed a general strike. However, there was always a social democrat elected to parliament in Czernowitz. Jakob Pistiner, from the General Jewish Labour Union (Jüdischer Arbeiterbund), advocated, together with the deputy of the German conservatives Alois Lebouton, separate schools for all ethnicities.732 In the Haus Morgenrojt, the social democrats established, with financial support from the US, professional courses in Yiddish.733

Given the policy of forced Romanization of all governments in Romania until 1928, representatives of non-Romanians were compelled to form a united front against this policy. After every initiative to improve their standing in parliament was thwarted, the Jewish deputies turned to the League of Nations in 1925.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.