The vandals smashed the windows of the historic synagogue in the city of Orăștie. The building was constructed in the late 1800s and is a historical monument. It was restored in the early 2000s and is also used for exhibitions and as a cultural center, according to the European Jewish Congress.
The vandalism itself, reported in the Stirile Transilvaniei newspaper, was first noticed on Monday morning by archaeologists from the local Museum of Ethnography and Folk Art, who saw the shattered windows and found a few medium-sized stones inside the synagogue.
According to Adevărul, the suspects were identified as a group of minors between the ages of nine and 14.
The vandalism came ahead of the 80th anniversary of the Iași pogrom, a brutal Holocaust murdering spree in the city of Iași that saw over 13,000 Jews killed between June 29 and July 16, 1941.Some who survived the initial massacre were forced onto train cars, where they were left for days while the train traveled back and forth across the countryside, killing most of the occupants through suffocation, dehydration and starvation.The Jews who were left behind in Iași were forced into a designated section of the town which was set up as an open ghetto, under curfew, where they lived under constant threat of deportation to labor camps. They endured regular beatings by both German and Romanian soldiers.
Survivors of the pogrom were unable to receive financial compensation for the damages incurred until 2017, when the announcement was made by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.
Thousands of headstones were also stolen from the city's ancient Ciurchi Street Jewish Cemetery, which had over 20,000 graves and dated back to 1467 before it was eventually razed in 1943 by order of then-prime minister Ion Antonescu. Many of these headstones were discovered in 2020 after heavy rainfall exposed an underground cavern in the city's Tatarasi Park.
Tamara Zieve and Cnaan Liphshiz/JTA contributed to this report.