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Michael Shafir, who played a key role in Holocaust memory in his native Romania, dies at 78
BUCHAREST (JTA) — When Michael Shafir moved to Israel from his native Romania as a teenager in the 1960s, it wasn’t because the Jewish teen was burning with Zionist fervor. Instead, it was the first country that agreed to take him.
“I would have left for wherever there was no communism, because I could no longer live with the feeling that you say one thing outside the house and another at home,” Shafir once said in an interview with Romanian media.
More than four decades later, Shafir would return to the country where he was born, as a professor of international relations. From his post at Babes-Bolyai University, in northwestern Romania, Shafir studied and published extensively on how post-communist right-wing nationalists distorted the past and trivialized or denied the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.
Shafir, who died Nov. 9 at 78, was known in his work and in his personal life for his straightforward and often humorous presentation of difficult truths.
“He was among the first to see the early emergence of nationalism in the [Romanian] communist regime’s politics,” his friend and colleague Liviu Rotman, an Israeli historian of Romanian Jewry, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Rotman said Shafir’s 2004 book “Between denial and trivialization. Holocaust denial in post-communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe” represented a “real encyclopedia” of Holocaust denial, as it outlined three forms that Shafir observed in post-communist states — outright, deflective (which “minimizes own-nation participation”) and selective (a combination of the other two). Shafir also took aim at what he called “comparative trivialization” of the Holocaust, or denying its uniqueness by equating it with communist crimes.
“I used to joke with Michael and told him that he produced a Mendeleev Table of Holocaust denial,” Rotman wrote on Facebook after his friend’s death, referring to the formal name for the periodic table that organizes elements according to their characteristics.
Known in Romania for his irreverent sense of humor and his chain smoking, Shafir’s massive figure wearing a trench coat — and occasionally a hat — could often be seen in the threshold of the conferences and events he attended.
“He was a person with an exceptional sense of humor, who always sent his friends jokes, who always found things to laugh about,” Jewish studies scholar Felicia Waldman told JTA.
“He liked to share everything he discovered, everything he thought,” added Waldman, who also recalled Shafir’s “undiplomatic” vehemence. “Sometimes that created problems for him.”
Shafir promoted his ideas in books and scholarly writing and conferences, but also in the Romanian press, where he proved to be a redoubtable polemicist. As a member of the International Commission for the Holocaust in Romania, he worked to make sure that people in his country understood the truth about the Holocaust and Romanian authorities’ collaboration with the Nazi regime. That history was obscured during the communist era and contested after it.
The commission was established by Romanian president Ion Iliescu in 2003 and headed by Romanian-born Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. Shafir and his fellow commission members concluded that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered in territories under Romanian control during World War II.
In 2004, their report was officially adopted by the Romanian state, which for the first time acknowledged its participation in the destruction of the European Jews.
“Today’s negationism can no longer have the excuse ‘I’ve not read, I’ve haven’t access to information,’” Shafir said in a podcast by the Wiesel Institute in 2021, in which he warns about the crafty and convoluted nature of most contemporary Holocaust denial.
Shafir was still working with the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania at the time of his death, which the institute and his family members confirmed.
Born in Bucharest in 1944, Shafir managed to move to Israel as a teenager in 1961, during one of the periods when Romania relaxed emigration rules for its Jews. He had run afoul of the Communist regime and sought to escape it.
In Israel, Shafir served in the army before moving to Munich, to work as a researcher on audiences at Radio Free Europe, the U.S.-funded radio station for communist Europe. From then on he balanced journalism with academic work: He then returned to Israel, earning a bachelor’s degree in political science and English literature at Hebrew University while directing foreign news at the Kol Israel radio station, a position he held until 1982. He had just earned a political science PhD at Hebrew University after writing a thesis on the Romanian intelligentsia under communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Shafir rejoined Radio Free Europe in the mid 1980s and held positions there until well after the fall of the Iron Curtain. His return to Romania and reclamation of his Romanian citizenship in 2005 inspired the country’s progressive left.
“Shafir meant a lot to me; he’s been a reference for his honesty and intellectual courage, and someone capable, like not many others, to review his positions when new data or historical sources asked for it,” Romanian-American software engineer-turned-historian Andrei Ursu told JTA.
Ursu was recently appointed scientific director of the Institute of the Romanian 1989 Revolution, an organization whose mission is to study that year’s Romanian anticommunist revolution. Two of his great-grandparents and a grandfather were killed during the Holocaust.
Ursu — whose father Gheorghe died after being savagely beaten while in politically motivated detention by Romania’s Communist secret police, the infamous Securitate — has been fighting for decades to combat the whitewashing of the Securitate in the country’s public discourse.
He described Shafir as “a person with an endless humor” and “without the exaggerated vanity common to many Romanian intellectuals.” Despite his frail health, Ursu said, Shafir agreed to review part of Ursu’s latest editorial project on the 1989 Romanian anti-communist revolution, “The Fall of a Dictator.”
Like other specialists who collaborated with Shafir, Ursu praised his work ethics and the precision of his sourcing and investigative work.
His media comments and public appearances were frequently peppered with jokes and anecdotes. In 2019, while speaking in an interview about the tens of thousands of Jews whom Ceausescu let emigrate in exchange for cash payments from Israel, Shafir told an old Romanian joke that starts with the Romanian dictator visiting a cooperative producing corn.
“How much do you get for a ton of maize?” Ceausescu asked the apparatchik in charge of the cooperative. “Just that? I get more if I sell 10 Jews.” To which the apparatchik retorts: “Then it’d be good if we start sowing Jews.”
In the interview, Shafir also recalled that the Jewish community headquarters in Bucharest used to display a sign warning gentiles desperate to get a visa to Israel and escape communism that “no conversions are accepted.”
“In the end, a conversion is much less dangerous than crossing the Danube swimming,” Shafir observed.
Although Shafir left Israel, he remained close to his family there and invested in the country’s politics. An activist with Peace Now who defined himself as a “critical Zionist,” Shafir rejected characterizations of Israel as an apartheid state but saw the Israeli continued military presence in the Palestinian territories as incompatible with democracy in the long term.
“He was very much worried about our future here in a country that is drifting to the right,” his daughter, Maurit Beeri, wrote on Facebook after her father’s death. She said he had recently spent time in Israel with his family, including his grandchildren.
Shafir’s body lay in state Nov. 13 at one of his university’s buildings in Cluj, Romania, where he lived with his wife, Aneta Feldman-Shafir.
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Tu B’Shvat, Conscious Eating, and the Jewish Call to Return
Orange trees in Israel’s northern Galilee region. Photo: פואד מועדי / Wikimedia Commons
Tu B’Shvat, the Jewish New Year for the Trees, is often celebrated simply: fruit on the table, blessings over figs and dates, and a nod to nature in the middle of winter. For those who do things a bit more lavishly, a ceremony or seder is conducted.
But at its core, the holiday of Tu B’Shvat is far more than a seasonal celebration. It is a day that offers a profound Jewish teaching about food, responsibility, and the possibility of return.
To understand that teaching, we have to go back to the very first act of eating in the Torah.
In the Garden of Eden, God gives Adam and Eve permission to eat freely from nearly everything around them. Only one boundary is set: there is one tree that is off limits. When Adam and Eve cross that boundary, the result is a rupture of faith between humans and God, which results in a series of other ruptures between humans and the earth — and humans and themselves.
One of the great Chassidic masters, Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen (1823-1900), suggested that the problem was not simply what they ate, but how they ate: without awareness, without restraint, and without consciousness. They consumed, rather than received.
Five hundred years ago, the kabbalists of Tzfat transformed Tu B’Shvat from a technical agricultural date into a spiritual opportunity. They taught that the world is filled with sparks of holiness, and that our everyday actions, especially eating, can either elevate those sparks or bury them further. This lesson has recently been discussed by the Jerusalem-based educator Sarah Yehuit Schneider.
Eating, in Jewish thought, is never neutral.
When we eat with intention and gratitude, we participate in tikkun olam, repairing the world. When we eat mindlessly, we reenact the mistake of Eve and Adam from the Garden of Eden.
The holiday of Tu B’Shvat invites us to try again.
There is another detail worth noting. The Torah’s first description of the human diet is explicitly plant-based: “I have given you every seed-bearing plant and every fruit-bearing tree; it shall be yours for food.” That diet, which was given in Eden, does not end with humanity’s exile from paradise. For generations to come, until after the great flood in the time of Noah, that diet continued in a world already marked by moral compromise.
On Tu B’Shvat, when Jews sit down to a table of fruit, we are quietly returning to that original vision of eating plant-based food that sustains life without taking it, nourishment that reflects restraint rather than domination.
That idea feels especially urgent today.
Our food choices now affect far more than our own bodies. They shape the treatment of animals, the health of the planet, and the sustainability of our food systems. Eating “without knowing” is something that carries grave consequences, which are all too visible in our society.
To observe conscious eating today means asking hard questions: Who is harmed by this choice? What systems does it support? What kind of world does it help create?
In my work as a rabbi and educator with Jewish Vegan Life, I encounter many Jews grappling with these questions, most of whom possess a desire to align their daily choices with enduring Jewish values of compassion, responsibility, and reverence for life.
Tu B’Shvat reminds us that Judaism does not demand perfection, but it does demand awareness. It teaches that repair is possible, not only through grand gestures, but through daily choices repeated with intention.
Redemption begins when a person makes a choice to eat their meal consciously. This is what the seder on Passover is for and what it reminds us of, and the same holds true for the seder on Tu B’Shvat.
The custom to eat fruits on Tu B’Shvat, the choice to have a seder or ceremony, reminds us of the consciousness that we must approach all of our meals with. On Tu B’Shvat, we are being asked to reconsider how we eat, how we live, and how we might take one small step closer to the world as it was meant to be. It is, after all, according to the Mishna in tractate Rosh Hashanah, one of the four New Years of the Jewish calendar.
Rabbi Akiva Gersh, originally from New York, has been working in the field of Jewish and Israel education for more than 20 years. He lives with his wife, Tamar, and their four kids in Pardes Hanna. He is the Senior Rabbinic Educator at Jewish Vegan Life. https://jewishveganlife.
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Jewish Survival Depends on the Existence of a Jewish State
People with Israeli flags attend the International March of the Living at the former Auschwitz Nazi German death camp, in Brzezinka near Oswiecim, Poland, May 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Kuba Stezycki
“The past is never dead, it is not even past,” a quotation from William Faulkner’s novel, Requiem for a Nun, is frighteningly apt today in relation to antisemitism.
Many of us are wondering if the antisemitism we are witnessing now is comparable to the antisemitism our parents or grandparents experienced during the 1930s, almost 100 years ago.
The parallels are obvious — the hatred and demonization of Jews/Israelis (especially on social media), boycotts of Jewish and Israeli businesses and products, and the aggressive public protests that include genocidal language and target Jewish neighborhoods and houses of worship.
There are also the increasingly common violent physical attacks on Jews, including murder, often carried out to coincide with Jewish festivals and religious observances.
There are also differences, of course.
Nothing like the 1935 Nuremberg Laws stripping German Jews of their rights, and designed to separate Jews from German society, have been enacted anywhere. But this point may not be as comforting as it sounds, because today, the most antisemitic countries in the world are not in Europe. They are in North Africa and the Middle East and, with the exception of a few thousand Jews remaining in Iran, these countries have virtually no Jews left to threaten. A majority of those Jews who once resided in that part of the world, and their descendants, are safe in Israel.
The existence of a Jewish State is the primary difference between the Jewish predicament today, and the situation that existed in the 1930s.
An episode such as that of the S.S. St. Louis, when 937 Jews fleeing Europe before the outbreak of World War II were denied sanctuary and sent back to almost certain death, would never happen today.
The Évian Conference is another example of Jewish powerlessness during the 1930s. Held from July 6 to July 15, 1938, representatives of 32 countries met in the French spa town of Évian-les-Bains to search for a solution to the Jewish refugee crisis precipitated by the intense antisemitism unleashed by the Nazis.
The conference achieved very little, and today the Évian conference is widely believed to have been a cynical ploy to deflect attention away from the refusal to raise US immigration quotas, or even fill existing quotas, to save Jews.
With the exception of the Dominican Republic (in the end, only a little more than 700 Jewish refugees found sanctuary there), no country agreed to accept Jewish refugees.
In a shocking example of indifference to Jewish concerns, representatives of a number of non-governmental organizations, including several Jewish ones, could observe but not participate in the proceedings. Golda Meir, an observer representing the Jewish Agency in Palestine at the Évian Conference is quoted as saying, “I don’t think anyone who didn’t live through it, can understand what I felt at Evian — a mixture of sorrow, rage, frustration and horror.”
In April 1943, American and British representatives met in Bermuda to discuss what to do with the Jewish refugees, both those liberated by the Allies as the war progressed, and those who might still be alive in Nazi-occupied Europe. The venue, Bermuda, a remote location in the midst of World War II, was chosen to minimize press coverage.
As in the case of Évian, no Jewish organization was allowed to participate. At the time the conference was held, there was no doubt about the full extent of the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Yet, once again, nothing was achieved. As in the case of the Évian Conference, the Bermuda Conference was a public relations event, and not an actual effort to protect Jewish lives.
All of these events — and hundreds more throughout history — emphasize the importance of a sovereign Jewish state for Jewish safety and survival. But what really makes this point stand out is a history that is often overlooked; the role that Mandatory Palestine played in saving Jews from the Holocaust.
Aliyah numbers show that despite restrictions limiting Jewish immigration imposed by British officials, and widespread opposition to Jewish immigration by Palestinian Arabs, approximately 200,000 to 250,000 Jews, mainly from Germany and Eastern Europe, were able to find sanctuary in the Mandate during the 1930s. How many more would have been saved had there been an independent Jewish state?
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.
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Did the Bondi Attack Actually Change Australia?
Grandparents of 10-year-old Matilda, who was killed during a mass shooting targeting a Hanukkah celebration on Sunday, grieve at the floral memorial to honor the victims of the mass shooting at Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jeremy Piper
The Bondi terrorist attack on December 14, 2025, changed Australia.
But in many ways, it also didn’t.
The shock of watching a murderous rampage unfold at one of our most iconic sites, in what Australians long believed was a safe, peaceful country, shook the nation to its core.
Fifteen innocent people being murdered at a peaceful Hanukkah event is something so foreign to the experience of Australians, that it shattered the country’s sense of security overnight. Most Australians believed this kind of hatred was something that occurred elsewhere, not here.
Such trauma can prompt genuine reflection — which in turn may lead to genuine change.
In the aftermath of the attack, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese struck a markedly different tone than he had previously, showing an empathy with Australia’s Jewish community that many of us felt was often sorely missing in the months following October 7, 2023.
On January 22, 2026, Albanese initiated a National Day of Mourning, observed across the country. Fifteen sites were illuminated to commemorate the 15 victims, Australians were encouraged to light candles in their windows, and — strikingly — the government even urged citizens to perform a mitzvah — yes, it used that word — in the victims’ memory, publishing a list of 15 suggested acts of kindness.
In a nationally televised address at the Sydney Opera House — the very site where, on October 9, 2023, crowds had gathered to celebrate the Hamas massacre in Israel — the Prime Minister offered a direct apology to the Jewish community, acknowledging that “we could not protect your loved ones from this evil.”
Five days later, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Albanese released a statement commemorating the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, describing “the immense multitudes of Jewish lives and futures stolen with a pitiless cruelty that remains scarcely fathomable in its evil.” To be fair, he issued a similar statement on the same day last year.
This moral clarity contrasted starkly with the BBC and US Vice President JD Vance, who both failed to even mention the word “Jew” in their statements marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Albanese’s apology for the Bondi massacre was a sharp departure from what had often been a strained and acrimonious relationship between his government and the Jewish community, driven by persistent and often disproportionate criticism of Israel during its war against Hamas and other terrorist groups, alongside a series of concrete policy decisions widely perceived as hostile toward a longstanding democratic ally.
In the weeks following Bondi, the government moved swiftly to legislate, recalling parliament early in order to pass a package of new federal hate and extremism laws, including the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill. These measures criminalize participation in designated hate groups, impose penalties of up to 15 years in prison for directing such organizations, expand visa-cancellation powers for individuals promoting hate, and tighten controls on extremist symbols and propaganda. A provision to criminalize extreme racial vilification was dropped in the face of the Opposition’s objections to it.
New South Wales, where the attack occurred, also introduced state-level laws granting police broader powers around protests linked to declared terrorist events.
A Royal Commission has also been commissioned to investigate antisemitism in Australia in the lead-up to the Bondi attack, following pressure from broad sections of the community after Albanese was initially opposed to holding one.
These steps were welcomed by the Jewish community, yet it remains far too early to declare them transformative. After all, hate-speech laws already existed across Australian jurisdictions, but were only rarely used.
History therefore suggests that legislation alone is rarely enough; the true test is whether authorities are willing to enforce the laws consistently, especially when doing so becomes politically uncomfortable.
And that discomfort may arrive very soon.
The upcoming visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog in early February, at Prime Minister Albanese’s invitation, will serve as a critical test of whether the empathy shown after Bondi represents a lasting shift or a fleeting political moment.
Already, Labor Friends of Palestine have called for President Herzog to be blocked from coming and investigated for alleged incitement and complicity in war crimes. Multiculturalism Minister Dr. Anne Aly initially declined to confirm whether she would welcome the Israeli President on his state visit, before later offering a notably lukewarm endorsement. There are also mass protests planned against his visit by anti-Israel groups. How the government deals with this will be telling.
These are the same kind of groups that supported Hamas after Oct. 7, and appeared on Australia Day, the national celebration of identity and unity, with calls for “intifada.”
Australia is currently at a crossroads in its relationship with Israel and also the Jewish community here. How it navigates that relationship could well determine the future of Jewish life in Australia. Hopefully the solidarity now being shown will be maintained and enhanced. But if it proves to be temporary, and the hostility being drummed up by the local anti-Zionist movement resurges, then the long-term feelings of belonging and security that underpin Australia’s long thriving Jewish community will likely erode further.
That, tragically, could echo the same sad and tragic path of many past Jewish communities throughout history.
Justin Amler is a policy analyst at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC).