Join us for a webinar on Jewish Forced Labour in Romania, 1940-1944 as part of our new series on the Romanian Jewry during the Holocaust:  Filling in the Gaps

The third programme in the series will focus on Jewish forced labour in Romania during the Holocaust.  Between 1941 and 1944, more than 100,000 Romanian Jews were conscripted into forced labour under the auspices of the Romanian military’s labour service system. Dr. Dallas Michelbacher’s presentation will look at how these labourers worked in a wide variety of contexts, including forced labour camps, mobile forced labour battalions, and forced labour units raised within Romanian cities. They performed numerous types of labour in the interest of the Romanian state, including road and railroad construction, clearing snow from streets and railroad tracks, work in war-related industry, and tasks of direct military significance like building and repairing fortifications. The forced labour system was part of a larger programme of persecution directed against Romanian Jews as part of the “Romanianization” policy pursued by Ion Antonescu’s regime, the goal of which was the complete removal of Jews from the Romanian social and economic life.

Greta Barak, an archivist at the Ghetto Fighters’ House, will present a war-time document stored in the GFH Archive: a note of the 89th Infantry Division of the Romanian Army concerning a group of 14 Jews sent to forced labour in October 1943.

The series is in participation with A.M.I.R. Organization, Romanian Cultural Institute in Tel Aviv, the Wilhelm Filderman Centre for the Study of Jewish History in Romania, the Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania, Classrooms Without Borders, Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, and the Rabin Chair Forum at George Washington University.

Register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcsf-usqjkuHNGbyMMVn8kJUXf5bAvRHu6t