How a Romanian Holocaust historian became a diplomat to Israel

• Author: LAHAV HARKOV
• Published date: 27 September 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Born in Bucharest to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother, Ioanid's connection to Israel goes beyond his ancestry.

His research into Romania's role in the Holocaust made him an enemy of Romania's communist regime, which he escaped.

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In the subsequent decades, as the premier historian of the Holocaust in Romania and the director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's International Archival Programs Division, he has clocked many hours in Yad Vashem and other archives throughout the country over decades of research.

One of Ioanid's books, The Ransom of the Jews: The story of the extraordinary secret bargain between Romania and Israel, which came out in a new edition this year, revealed that Israel paid Ceausescu's Romania thousands of dollars per person to allow over 100,000 of the country's Jews to emigrate to Israel.

Ioanid shared his extraordinary life story with The Jerusalem Post this month from the ambassador's residence in Herzliya, which he shares with his wife, five cats – including one named after perhaps the most famous Romanian in literature, Dracula – and a Dachshund named Felix.

"I grew up in a family in which both parents were university professors," Ioanid recalled. "Though they were left-wing, and at a certain point my father was a communist, they were very against the Ceausescu regime."

The Ioanid family home was full of books – "which is not rare in a part-Jewish family," he quipped – and Western periodicals like Le Monde and L'Expresse that his father would buy on the black market.

Ioanid chose to study sociology because it was viewed as a "bourgeois" topic in communist Romania, and therefore, was less under the thumb of official ideological dictates.

"I profoundly disliked the Ceausescu regime, and I realized at a certain point that the regime looks more and more like a fascist one," he says. "The political extremes are very similar," an idea known as the Horseshoe Theory.

"The regime was a national socialist regime," Ioanid added, using the full meaning of Nazi. "Even certain rallies started to look like Nazi rallies, and Ceausescu also started to rehabilitate Romanian fascists and praise them and attempt to justify them."

Ioanid wrote his PhD on fascism in Romania at the University of Cluj, under an advisor who had survived the Holocaust. He had no access to primary sources, as the communist regime...