Simon Wiesenthal Center Commends Israel’s President for Setting the Record Straight about Romania and the Holocaust

August 13, 2010

The Simon Wiesenthal Center commended Israeli President Shimon Peres for acknowledging, on Friday during a visit to a Holocaust memorial in Bucharest, Romania, that hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered “by Romanian assassins” during the Nazi Holocaust.

“The President did the right thing by correcting, for the record, the full complex record of Romania’s treatment of Jews during the Holocaust,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, Dean and Founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

During an earlier speech, President Peres praised Romania for saving 400,000 Jews, but as Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office pointed out, the President failed to make any mention of the infamous role of Marshall Ion Antonescu, whose government was complicit in the mass murder of 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in the United States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino).

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