{"id":182364,"date":"2026-06-29T07:07:12","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T07:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/182364\/"},"modified":"2026-06-29T07:07:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T07:07:12","slug":"isaac-herzog-says-modern-day-antisemitism-must-be-combated-at-pogrom-memorial-ceremony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/182364\/","title":{"rendered":"Isaac Herzog says modern-day antisemitism must be combated at pogrom memorial ceremony"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Isaac Herzog attended a Romanian<\/a> state ceremony on Sunday marking the 85th anniversary of the Ia\u0219i pogrom, where he delivered a speech warning of the dangers of antisemitism in the present day.<\/p>\n

In June of 1941, more than 13,000 Jewish inhabitants of Ia\u0219i, constituting around one-third of the city’s Jewish population, were massacred by the Nazi-aligned Romanian authorities. Today, the community numbers in the hundreds.<\/p>\n

The ceremony was held at the Ia\u0219i Jewish cemetery and included representatives of the Romanian government, city leadership, and members of the local Jewish community.<\/p>\n

Chief Rabbi of Romania, Rabbi Rafael Shaffer, opened the ceremony with the recitation of Kaddish, followed by Herzog’s speech. Afterward, a reburial ceremony for newly identified victims of the massacre took place.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is no coincidence that in this very town, decades before the Ia\u0219i pogrom and massacre, Naftali Herz Imber wrote the first draft of what would become the Israeli national anthem: Hatikvah, The Hope,” Herzog said.<\/p>\n

\"PeoplePeople view the exhibits at Yad Vashem on April 13, 2026. (credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)<\/p>\n

“Imagine, as we stand here, in this somber, sobering place, we note that our nation’s hope emerged from Ia\u0219i. Naftali Herz Imber’s words became the anthem of that great human movement, Zionism, that saw Jews take their destiny into their own hands and establish a Jewish national home in the land of Israel,\u201d Herzog said.<\/p>\n

In his speech, Herzog also made a connection between the antisemitism of the Holocaust era and the antisemitism Jews experience in the present day.<\/p>\n

‘Antisemitism is once again rearing its ugly head’<\/p>\n

\u201cThis act of remembrance for the many thousands of Jewish women, men, children, and elderly murdered on this soil, in Ia\u0219i and its surroundings between June 28 and July 6, 1941, does not erase the suffering of the victims.”<\/p>\n

“Nor does it lessen the ethical stain of the perpetrators. It does not undo the murder, the humiliation, the beatings, or the death trains, orchestrated high up, but unleashed across every level of society, during those infernal summer days, 85 years ago.”<\/p>\n

\u201cNor does it help us make sense of this simple but burning question: How? How can the cruelty of this scope, across an entire society, possibly be comprehended?”<\/p>\n

Herzog directed focus to the achievements of Romanian Jews, such as the founding of Rosh Pina in northern Israel and Naftali Herz Imber’s composition of ‘Hatikva,’ Israel’s<\/a> national anthem.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is therefore all the more alarming that in too many places across Europe, and through the sinister influence of an evil empire that traffics in hatred,” Herzog remarked, “antisemitism is again rearing its ugly head.”<\/p>\n

“The moral infrastructure that humanity established in response to the moral destruction of the Holocaust<\/a> is weaker than it has been for eighty years,” he continued.<\/p>\n

“This is a danger for Jews, this is a danger for all people of goodwill. It is therefore our shared responsibility to recognize and name this danger, to actively embrace the moral calling it invokes, and to fiercely combat it. Let that be the lesson of Ia\u0219i,” he concluded.<\/p>\n

Herzog is set to address the Romanian Parliament on Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Isaac Herzog attended a Romanian state ceremony on Sunday marking the 85th anniversary of the Ia\u0219i pogrom,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":182365,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[33],"tags":[2492,31408,14814,24000,16069,37,55066,2247],"class_list":["post-182364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-israel","tag-antisemitism","tag-herzog","tag-holocaust","tag-holocaust-memorial-day","tag-holocaust-survivors","tag-israel","tag-pogroms","tag-romania"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116832137738103250","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/182365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}