Bahais reported registration requirements continued to limit their activities. Religious groups reported increased problems obtaining the restitution of previously confiscated properties, while the number of properties actually returned remained extremely low. The Greek Catholic Church, in particular, was unable to obtain restitution of many of its churches and other properties. A number of religious minority groups were concerned about government implementation of laws regarding religious instruction in schools.
The government approved four applications for religious association status during the year and rejected four because of incomplete documentation. Groups whose applications were rejected could reapply once they have the necessary documents.
Bahai leaders emphasized the need to amend the religion law to include provisions for the burial of those who do not belong to one of the recognized religions. Bahais were registered as a religious association.
Many religious groups continued to state they viewed the membership requirements to be recognized as religious associations as discriminatory because these requirements were more burdensome than for other types of associations. They also criticized the four-tier system of religious registration.
Bahai leaders continued to say that because the Bahai Faith did not have formal religion status, the State Secretariat for Religious Affairs did not notify its leadership about the secretariat’s consultations with recognized religions regarding proposed amendments to legislation affecting religious affairs. The government stated they welcomed written proposals from all religious associations and meetings with religious association leaders.
In Sibiu in June and August 2015, police fined Jehovah’s Witnesses 150 lei ($35) for distributing leaflets in the streets, which the police classified as unauthorized street vending and advertising. The group challenged the fines in court; in one case, the court cancelled the fine and decided to give an admonition; in a second case, a judge ruled against the Jehovah’s Witnesses in May 2016. In a third case, the judge ruled in favor of the Jehovah’s Witnesses in December and annulled the fine.
In April local authorities approved a town planning certificate that included the building of a mosque in Bucharest. A former city hall candidate, Catalin Berenghi, filed a court case to annul the government 2015 decision transferring the land to the Muslim community. The court case was pending at year’s end, and construction of the mosque remained on hold. Former President Traian Basescu continued to criticize the proposed mosque, stating the number of Muslims in Bucharest did not justify the mosque, and that “part of the Islamization of Europe is building mosques everywhere.” During campaigning for local elections in June, leading Bucharest mayoral candidates argued for a referendum on the mosque. Mayor Gabriela Firea, who won in June, supported a referendum. In April the Unified Romania Party – a newly created political party that submitted candidates for both local and national elections – organized a march for Christians to protest the building of the mosque. Fifty people participated in the march.
In 2016, the SRC reported it approved the restitution of 17 buildings to religious denominations, approved compensation in 19 cases, and rejected 1,578 other claims; in 50 cases, the filers withdrew their claims. The number of cases resolved increased 30 percent – from 1,140 in 2015 to 1,664 – but the number of positive decisions remained extremely low. Religious communities disputing these rulings continued having to go to court and incur additional costs.
Greek Catholics regained one property via restitution. According to the National Authority for Property Restitution, the SRC rejected some claims for restitution of Greek Catholic properties, including cemeteries, on the grounds they had been transferred to the ROC during communism, and thus could not be returned, as they did not belong to the state.
The government did not issue regulations for implementing new property restitution legislation granting priority to cases involving Holocaust survivors. Nevertheless, by year’s end, the SRC had received 25 applications requesting priority for Holocaust survivors and had approved priority status for all of them.
The primary NGO handling Jewish communal claims stated the SRC feared assuming responsibility for restitution and preferred passing decisions on to the courts. The community also stated the claims procedure was overly bureaucratic and the 120-day deadline for document submission was unreasonable, particularly because a large number of requests by the SRC to the Jewish claimants for additional documents often came in simultaneously. It also complained of cases where the NCREC had invalidated previous positive decisions for compensation by the SRC. This was the case of a Jewish community property in Galati, for which the NCREC denied compensation based on the fact that the street on which the property sat had changed names after the 1989 revolution, thereby not matching the original deed. The case was in court at year’s end. The Caritatea Foundation, established by the Federation of Jewish Communities and the World Jewish Restitution Organizations, an NGO, to oversee Jewish communal property claims, reported the SRC approved 12 claims – two via restitution and 10 via compensation – and rejected 86. In 58 other cases, the claims were withdrawn.
Religious groups appealed 493 decisions by the SRC in the courts during the year. The Jewish community appealed seven cases; Greek Catholics, three; the ROC, four; the ROC Fund of Burkovina, 390; the Roman Catholic Church, 19; the Evangelical Church, nine; and the Armenian Church, 16. Information concerning court decisions on these cases was unavailable.
According to Greek Catholics, courts continued to delay hearings on many restitution lawsuits filed by the Greek Catholic Church and asked the Greek Catholic Church to pay judicial fees, a requirement Greek Catholics said was not consistent with the law. The ROC continued to file appeals or change of venue requests that delayed resolution of some lawsuits. In a majority of past cases, courts ruled against the restitution of Greek Catholic churches, even when the Greek Catholic Church produced ownership deeds, on the grounds that the Greek Catholic Church had a smaller number of adherents than did the ROC. There were no reports of court decisions on Greek Catholic restitution cases during the year.
In October 2015, Greek Catholics appealed to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) after the High Court of Cassation and Justice issued its final ruling in favor of the ROC in a restitution lawsuit over a former Greek Catholic church in Sapanta, Maramures County. Greek Catholics said the ECHR did not act on the complaint during the year and had not issued a case number at year’s end. The ROC also continued to control the Greek Catholic-established cemetery attached to the church, known as the “merry cemetery,” a significant tourist attraction.
On May 5, the Alba Tribunal overturned a December 2015 ruling by a lower court rejecting a 2013 legal claim by the Satu Mare County Council for ownership of property the government and the courts had previously restored to the Greek Catholic Church in Bixad. The council’s claim had blocked restoration of the properties to the Church. By overturning the lower court’s decision, which had found that the council chairman did not have his council’s approval to file the case, the Alba Tribunal revived the case, beginning another cycle of litigation and further delaying possible restitution. The next court date in the case was set for January 2017.
Representatives of the Greek Catholic Church filed two cases with the ECHR for restitution of churches in Bistrita and Breb in April and July, respectively. In the Bistrita church case, the community complained about courts frequently ceding Greek Catholic property to the ROC based on census data showing Greek Catholics as a minority and about the unreasonable length of the trial (nine years). In the Breb case, Greek Catholics said that, after being given back the church in 1990, the court again gave the church to the ROC in 2015 on the grounds that the 2011 census showed the Greek Catholics were a minority.
The ethnically Hungarian churches in Transylvania – the Reformed, Roman Catholic, Unitarian, and Evangelical Lutheran Churches – maintained that authorities failed to take into account the complex organization of these Churches and the community services they provided before communism. They said the government had thus rejected a number of restitution claims because the entities that operated under the Churches and were registered as property owners in the land registries were not the same entities as the contemporary Churches. They said that it was because communism had confiscated and dismantled those former Church entities that they no longer existed as such, but they were in fact owned and operated by the Churches. The ethnically Hungarian Churches said they had 1,611 schools that were nationalized under communism, and thus became state property. The bishop of the Transylvania Reformed Church, the main Hungarian-minority church in the country, reported the restitution of Church properties confiscated in the past had been “blocked,” and the process was too slow.
The Roman Catholic Church contested in court the SRC’s 2015 rejection of a restitution claim for the Batthyaneum Library and an astronomical institute in Alba Iulia. The case was pending at year’s end.
Greek Catholic priests continued to state that local authorities did not grant construction permits for places of worship, even though there were no apparent legal grounds for denying them. Greek Catholics attributed the delayed issuance of permits to pressure from the ROC.
Local authorities reportedly also failed to enforce court rulings restoring land to the Greek Catholic Church in Valcau de Jos, Sapanta, Poieni, Morlaca, Bologa, Salonta, and other localities. In Cordos, the local authorities did not respond to the Greek Catholic Church’s request for the restitution of land.
The mayor and majority party on the Bucharest City Council granted the ROC three million euros ($3.2 million) from the year’s local budget for the Romanian People’s Salvation Cathedral, the patriarchal cathedral of the ROC under construction. Council members from the opposition parties criticized the decision, stating the ROC’s key revenues had never been taxed and the money could be better used for other purposes. Multiple local media outlets criticized the funding decision.
Media, parents’ associations, and NGOs stated the high percentage of children from kindergarten through high school who opted for religion classes – almost 90 percent – was the result of manipulation and pressure by the ROC and by school directors who declined to offer parents any alternatives to the classes.
Religious minority groups said the ROC was treated as the national church, although it did not formally have this status. In public speeches, some politicians and the media equated Romanian Orthodoxy with national identity, suggesting followers of other religions lacked patriotism.
According to several religious groups, all military chaplains continued to be ROC priests with the exception of one Roman Catholic priest and one pastor from the Evangelical Alliance.
Religious minority groups, including the Seventh‑day Adventist Church and the Greek Catholic Church, continued to report that authorities generally allowed only the ROC an active role in annual opening ceremonies at schools and other community events and, in most cases, did not invite other religious groups to attend such ceremonies. Greek Catholic priests from Transylvania continued to report they were only invited to official local events when local government leaders and/or the local ROC leaders decided they could come, and they did not officiate at these events.
Prosecution of anti-Semitic speech, including Holocaust denial, occurred rarely. The government-established Elie Wiesel Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania said prosecutors were reluctant to indict. From January 1 to September 30, the police reported eight new criminal complaints. For the first half of the year (January-June), the national-level Prosecutor General’s Office reported having received – from police, military prosecutors, or self-initiation – 42 cases to be resolved. Of these 42 cases, they resolved 12: one by waiver of criminal prosecution (defined as there being no public interest in prosecuting the case), while 11 cases were deemed insufficient to prosecute and were dropped. Cases were often delayed because of lengthy investigations. As of mid-September Gorj police, under the supervision of the Targu Jiu prosecutor’s office, were still investigating a case raised by the NGO Center for Monitoring and Combating Anti-Semitism (MCA) in 2014, involving a lamp shade posted for sale online and advertised as being made of “Jewish skin.”
In May the country’s central bank released a coin bearing the image of former National Bank of Romania Governor Mihail Manoilescu, who was widely acknowledged to have promoted anti-Semitism. Manoilescu was minister of foreign affairs in the country’s fascist government in 1940 and, prior to that, a financial supporter of the fascist, anti-Semitic, Iron Guard. The central bank stated the coin was part of a series honoring former bank governors and noted Manoilescu had been governor in 1931, a year of economic crisis in the country. The bank further said it did not intend to offend any community or “send a message with an offensive, xenophobic, or discriminatory nature.”
Bucharest mayoral candidate Marian Munteanu of the National Liberal Party, the country’s second largest party, made a statement on April 13 criticizing 2015 legislation that proscribed anti-Semitic speech and Holocaust denial as anti-Semitic because they singled out Jews. A watchdog agency on anti-Semitism and the Wiesel Institute warned that Munteanu “presents a concern,” citing previous anti-Semitic statements by him, including one in which he said local Jews lied about the number of Romanian Jews killed in the Holocaust to “obtain illicit money from Romanian people through disinformation and manipulation of public opinion.”
The Wiesel Institute reported streets, organizations, schools, or libraries continued to be named after persons convicted of war crimes or crimes against humanity and that authorities continued to allow exhibitions containing material that promoted the Legionnaire Movement. The institute cited as an example an exhibition in May entitled “Ion Gavrila Ogoranu – Present!” Ogoranu was an anticommunist resistance fighter in the first years of communism, but previously was a member of the Legionnaire Movement. Exhibition organizers cited this membership as part of what they said was an “exemplary biography.” Despite letters from the Wiesel Institute to local authorities saying legislation banned such presentations, the exhibition took place as scheduled in the central University Square of Bucharest and in the Alba Iulia National Museum.
In April a retired intelligence officer published a book called The Holocaust – the Diabolical Scarecrow – Money Extortion for the Holocaust. In a media interview, the author stated that, while working for the intelligence service, he was tasked in the 1990s with writing and publishing articles under a pseudonym against “propaganda and actions” of Jewish community leaders, who were speaking out against anti-Semitism in the country, with the purpose of denigrating such leaders. The MCA filed a complaint and requested prosecution of the book’s author for Holocaust denial. As of mid-October the case was pending with the prosecutor’s office of Bucharest District 3, assigned to the lower level court. The Wiesel Institute also sent a letter to the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI), noting the book’s author appeared on the cover dressed in military uniform. SRI replied that, since he was a retired officer, it could not impose any sanction.
The MCA stated online that it wanted to draw attention to what it called the indifference of authorities to anti-Semitism and their tendency to delay procedures to implement legislation to combat anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, and discrimination in general.
The government continued to implement the recommendations of the 2004 International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania (Wiesel Commission) Report and to cooperate with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in promoting Holocaust education. In September the Wiesel Institute and the USHMM signed cooperation agreements with multiple political parties and governmental institutions concerning Holocaust education for their members. The two largest parties – the Social Democratic Party and the National Liberal Party – as well as the ethnically Hungarian party, the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, were parties to such agreements, as was the National School of Political Science and Public Administration, a Bucharest-based university. Other institutions that had signed the agreement as of October were the National Intelligence Academy of the Intelligence Service and the Institute for Defense Political Studies and Military History under the Ministry of National Defense.
On August 31, the government approved a staff increase of three positions for the Wiesel Institute to coordinate the creation of a museum of Romanian Jewry. On September 29, the Bucharest General Council approved the transfer of a building in central Bucharest to the Wiesel Institute for the museum. The government commemorated National Holocaust Remembrance Day in October with a series of events, including a wreath-laying ceremony at the Holocaust Memorial in Bucharest. On that same day, the Bucharest general mayor’s office inaugurated the naming of a square after Elie Wiesel.
The government continued to include the Holocaust in history courses in the seventh, eighth, 10th, and 12th grades. During the 2016-2017 school year, 2,984 students in more than 100 classes from 75 schools nationwide enrolled in the optional course entitled History of the Jews – The Holocaust.
In January at an International Holocaust Remembrance Day event, Foreign Minister Lazar Comanescu stated the Foreign Ministry would continue to contribute to strengthening legal and institutional instruments that could prevent and penalize anti-Semitism.
The country is a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and began its chairmanship of the organization in March. The government held two IHRA alliance plenary meetings, one in Bucharest in May and the other in Iasi in November. Under the auspices of its IHRA chairmanship, the country held a number of events throughout the year, including: training sessions on combatting anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, and Holocaust denial for magistrates, law enforcement, and diplomats; a national “Memory of the Holocaust” contest for middle and high school students; teacher training courses on Holocaust education in Romania and Israel; and multiple events commemorating the Holocaust.