The legionnaires founded the Jewish theater in the capital, and Romania protected the Jewish population from the horrors of the war, a well-known Romanian anti-Semite argues.
NEWS: You (e.n. Jews) are the ones who are responsible for anti-Semitism in Romania. History will remember us for how good we treated you during World War II. We built theaters for you, you went to see theatre plays while others were taken to Auschwitz by train, from Northern Bukovina and from Horthy-occupied Transylvania. During this time you went to the theater built by Radu Gyr, well, by the legionnaire Radu Gyr, the first director of the Jewish theater! To which Maia Morgenstern screams, this f***ing **** (editor's note: lawyer Rapcea used an insulting term, associated with the anti-Semitic movement in Romania and the Holocaust, which Veridica prefers not to reproduce), that sir, is what those damn legionnaires did for you... Well, they made a a theatre for you, mind you! Instead of sending you to Auschwitz in wagons like cattle, you were shoveling snow as patriotic work. You weren't even sent to the frontlines. [...] Do you think we don't know the real history? You bastards! And now you’re filing anti-Semitism cases against everyone? Well, we’ll show you what anti-Semitism means, if you'll keep pissing us off. You bastards! You’re now painting swastikas on the funerary stones in the cemetery, claiming Romanians are anti-Semitic?! We have evidence that you and your children are making swastikas to claim Romania is anti-Semitic! How is that so? [...] Well, we didn’t react enough, we are a martyred people. [...] A people martyred by the Jews [...] And now you want to silence us, so we can’t tell the truth? [...] When you see that the bills keep skyrocketing, that the country is all but plundered, that everything is being stolen from you, do you think you are getting rid of this nation? I’ll tell you what – we’ll pick up the hatchets and make war, just like Mihai Viteazu. [...]”
NARRATIVES: 1. The legionnaires founded the Jewish theater in Bucharest. 2. Romania protected the Jewish population during World War II. 3. The Jewish community desecrates its own cemeteries as part of “false flag” frame-ups.
PURPOSE: To promote legionnaire, anti-Semitic and extremist rhetoric, to amplify sovereignist and ultra-religious sentiments, to stir anti-establishment movements.
Antonescu’s legionnaire dictatorship did not protect the Jewish community
WHY THE NARRATIVES ARE FALSE: The entire story presented in the video in question is part of the meta-narrative that vehemently challenges or minimizes the existence of the Jewish Holocaust in Romania, which has been promoted for years by a part of right-wing, ultra-conservative and ultra-religious extremists. The theater that lawyer Rapcea refers to in his deeply anti-Semitic rave is Barașeum Theater, which operated in Bucharest between 1941-1945. The institution was founded on March 1, 1941, in the context of the anti-Semitic laws introduced by the Antonescu dictatorship at the end of 1940. Thus, at the start of September, the Ministry of Religions and the Arts decided that “all Jewish personnel from national or private theaters, even those not subsidized by the state, or from any other companies with an artistic or performative character, are excluded without exception”. The absurd measure of eliminating Jews from artistic life was strongly criticized by theater professionals, especially since it targeted not only actors and directors, but also playwrights and technical staff. Leading figures of Romanian theater (Ion Iancovescu, Tudor Muşatescu, Ion Vasilescu, Victor Ion Popa, Velimir Maximilian, etc.) vehemently protested, refusing to submit to such measures. On numerous occasions, they demanded “clarifications” about the motive behind the decision from the general director of legionnaire theaters (not the Jewish theater) Radu Gyr. In fact, the compromise solution of establishing a theater for Jewish artists is largely owed to the writer Liviu Rebreanu, who succeeded Gyr as head of the General Directorate of Theaters after the removal of the legionnaires from power in January 1941. The great writer was the one who, in fact, managed to obtain the approval of the Ministry of Religions and the Arts for the establishment of the Barașeum Theater, where, however, only plays written by Jewish authors, played only by Jewish actors and directed only by Jews were allowed to be staged, exclusively in Romanian. The existence of a theater where Jews could stage their artistic expressions was classified by the cultural world as an “artistic gulag”, instead of a favor by the Romanian state to the Jewish artistic community.
In the same cynical vein, apparently favoring Jews, Rapcea also interprets the decision of the authorities to exclude Jewish men from the Romanian army and subject them to forced labor through a program of “community labor” in December 1940. In fact, the labor to which the Jews were subjected was mandatory (legislated in the summer of 1942, to differentiate it from the voluntary work for civic and patriotic purposes, performed by ethnic Romanians). The Jewish forced labor detachments were used for the hardest types of work, such as building railways, roads and highways, fortification works or other works of military interest. Although, officially, the work had to be carried out only by able-bodied men, Jewish students, pupils and elderly people were also forced to perform agricultural work, clear snow or dig up victims of bombings, in a modern form of slavery. In order to be exempted from mandatory labor, the authorities introduced a system of huge taxes which Jews could pay, the equivalent of exhausting and destructive labor. Although this facility was widely available in legal terms, it was not put into practice, because the assets of Jews subjected to mandatory labor had been confiscated by the state anyway.
As for the desecration of Jewish cemeteries by Jews in order to accuse Romanians of anti-Semitism, we are obviously dealing with another false narrative. The most recent such incidents in Romania took place in Bucharest (2017), Huși (2019) and Ploiești (2021). In none of these cases the perpetrators identified by investigators were Jewish but rather Romanian. Furthermore, no swastikas or other Nazi or anti-Semitic symbols on the funerary monuments were reported, as these were simply vandalized. Moreover, the motivation of the sentence issued by judges in the Huși investigation clearly states that “the actions were not committed by the defendants for religious, anti-Semitic reasons”, even rejecting the request of the Federation of the Jewish Community of Romania – The Mosaic Church regarding the obligation of the three minors and their families to pay moral damages. All in all, these incidents cannot be used as an argument in favor of Romanians’ anti-Semitism, as Rapcea claims.
Finally, it is worth highlighting the illegal character of the entire intervention, coming (of all people!?) from a lawyer, which blatantly contravenes the legislation to combat anti-Semitism and can easily be criminally framed as incitement to hatred and discrimination. In this respect, we must note the lawyer’s threat “we have evidence that you and your children are making swastikas”, which is part of a wider campaign to compile “blacklists” carried out by supporters of the former pro-legionnaire candidate, Călin Georgescu. At the same time, we are sorry to note the reiteration of the deeply anti-Semitic narrative that claims that Jews are responsible for all the problems in Romania (corruption, economic crises, high costs of living, etc.) and, just like the 1940s, the country should be “cleansed” of such elements.
Holocaust denial in Romania: a campaign started by communists and perfected by the far right
BACKGROUND: In the years following World War II, the communist regime constantly “downplayed” the historiography of the Holocaust in Romania, denying its magnitude, in order to highlight the status of the entire population of the country as victims of Nazism. At the same time, this strategy was also designed to prevent possible claims of reparations from Holocaust survivors. After 1989, Holocaust denial in Romania was added to the discourse of several political parties, while at the same becoming a widespread phenomenon, adopted by various groups with diverse ideologies: nationalists, xenophobes, conspiracy-mongers, authoritarianists, anti-democratic or far right nostalgics. To that end, a multitude of narratives emerged, speaking of an alternative history, where the Jews of Romania were among the most fortunate. In fact, according to countless archive documents, the infamous “final solution” of Hitler's ideology found its counterpart in Romania in the form of “the cleansing of the land”, the name that Marshal Ion Antonescu gave to operations directed against the Jews. What started with over 20 anti-Jewish laws, eventually peaked with pogroms (Dorohoi, Iași, Bucharest, Odesa) and mass-deportations in the early 1940s in territories controlled by the Romanian state. An estimated 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews, as well as 11,000 Roma, were killed by the Romanian state. In addition, in Northern Transylvania, at the time under the authority of Hungary, approximately 150,000 Romanian Jews were killed, about 132,000 of whom had been deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
The BitChute platform, where Mihai Rapcea's video was published, is a video-hosting service that describes itself as offering freedom of expression. In fact, it represents a media space where a lot of extremists and conspiracy theorists voice their opinions unhindered, promoting racist, chauvinistic and xenophobic rhetoric, inciting hatred and violence. Most of the people who use BitChute have been banned on YouTube. In November 2018, BitChute was excluded from the online payment service PayPal, and in 2019, the same measure was taken by the crowdfunding site IndieGogo. Later, the Patreon and Stripe platforms also banned BitChute funding.
Mihai Rapcea became known in local media as the lawyer of the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA), of which he was a member. An organization seemingly devoted to yoga practitioners, MISA has been involved in countless scandals linked to pandering, pornography, forced prostitution, sexual slavery, human trafficking, etc. For several years, Rapcea has become a promoter of several conspiracy theories related to the global cabal, the great health reset, etc. On January 1, 2025, jointly with two other men, the lawyer protested against the Constitutional Court’s ruling to annul the presidential election in front of the Parliament building in Bucharest, wearing nothing but his underwear and crudely mimicking the Nazi salute, although in a video published online, he explains, “for fear of the Ellie Wiesel Institute”, that his gestured had a different connotation.
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