Wilhelm Filderman: Memoirs and Diaries, volume 1 – 1900-1940

Diary of the former leader of the Jews of Romania in the inter-war period. Filderman supervised the process of obtaining equal rights for Jews following World War I. The first part covers 1900-1940, and deals with the fate of the last eastern European Jewish community to be emancipated (1923), and its struggle for civil rights amid antisemitism; Jewish integration within the weak democracy of “Greater Romania” between the two world wars; the emergence and expansion of A. C. Cuza’s antisemitic movement and C. Codreanu’s fascist Iron Guard; the antisemitic policies of pro-Western governments (1919-1940); the Romanian establishment’s betrayal of the Jews and willingness to pay with Jewish money for rapprochement with Nazi Germany; Jewish life: organizations, assimilation and Zionism, education, community and religious affairs, and finally the first pogroms in June 1940. The second volume will cover the Holocaust period, 1940-1944.

“Wilhelm Filderman was one of the outstanding leaders of Romanian Jewry during the stormy years of its statehood and rise of antisemitism which ended in violence against the Jews and the Holocaust… The book is a collection of diaries and writings which allow us to learn about Romanian Jewry, its struggles for equal rights, Jewish life during the interwar period and the relations of the Jews with their non-Jewish neighbors as antisemitism was on the rise.” [Zion, 5765]