Herzog: ‘We must fiercely combat rising antisemitism in Europe’

Herzog attended a state ceremony at the Iasi Jewish cemetery along with Romanian government officials, local leaders, and members of the local Jewish community, Israeli media reported.

The chief rabbi of Romania, Rabbi Rafael Shaffer, opened the ceremony by reciting the Kaddish. 

Speaking afterwards, the Herzog said: “What happened here must compel us to ask how our world of memory obligates us to build and remember in the present.

"It is our duty to ensure that every boy and girl in Romania, in Europe and across the world, learns about this horror and its shame, visits this site and confronts this painful history.”

Later in his speech, he addressed rising Jew-hate across Europe.

“It is deeply troubling that in far too many places across Europe, under the malicious influence of an empire of evil that spreads hatred, antisemitism is again raising its ugly head,” Herzog said.

“The moral foundation that humanity built in response to the moral destruction of the Holocaust is weaker than it has been for 80 years.”

He went on: "This is a danger for Jews, this is a danger for all people of goodwill.

"It is therefore our shared responsibility to recognise and name this danger, to actively embrace the moral calling it invokes, and to fiercely combat it. Let that be the lesson of Iasi.”

Herzog explained how long before the massacre, the poet Naftali Herz Imber wrote the first draft of what would later become Israel’s national anthem, ‘Hatikvah’, in Iasi.

He said: “Imagine, as we stand here in this sombre place, we mark that our nation’s hope grew from Iasi.

“Imber’s words became the anthem of that great human movement, Zionism, which saw Jews take their fate into their own hands and establishing a Jewish national home in the Land of Israel.”