Irina Nastasă-Matei

Gerda Henkel-Research Fellow (01/2025 – 06/2025)

The United Romanian Jews of America and Its Responses to Antisemitism and the Holocaust in Romania (1918–1970s)

The project aims to analyse the United Romanian Jews of America (URJA)’s roughly 60 years of activity in supporting Romanian Jews in the face of various and fluid forms of antisemitism – those from the interwar period that culminated in the Holocaust as well as the more insidious ones from the communist period. URJA documented the Romanian governments’ violations of the Jewish minority rights, negotiated with the Romanian and US authorities for their safeguarding and for conditioning financial and economic aid on fair treatment of Jews, and denounced the antisemitic laws of Octavian Goga’s government from 1937. During the Second World War it reported to the whole world on pogroms, deportations and mass murders of Romanian Jews, advocated for rescue measures, and collaborated with other Jewish aid organisations, such as the Joint Distribution Committee. The organisation remained active until the 1970s. It continued to support Romanian Jews living in the US and Israel, protested the Romanian communist regime’s mistreatment of the Jewish population, and fought to bring war criminals to justice; the most prominent case being the successful efforts of Charles Kremer – a dentist and Wiesenthal ally who had fled Romania – to denounce and expel from the US the Archbishop Valerian Trifa, a former leader of the Iron Guard.

Irina Nastasă-Matei is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Bucharest. In 2013, she concluded her PhD in history on the topic “Students from Romania in the Third Reich. 1933-1945” at Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj. She has held several fellowships, e.g. from Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich (DAAD Research Scholarship) and the German Culture Forum for Central and Eastern Europe in Munich, and directed international projects Romania’s transnational and Jewish history. She is the author of the monograph Education, Politics and Propaganda: Romanian students in Nazi Germany (in Romanian, 2016), co-author of the book Culture and Propaganda. The Romanian Institute in Berlin, 1940-1945 (with Lucian Nastasă-Kovacs, 2018 in Romanian and 2023 in German), and author of over thirty articles, including several on Jewish life in interwar Romania.

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