Tag #127049 - Interview #78410 (Ticu Goldstein)

Right after the war, I joined the Zionist left-wing organization Hashomer Hatzair [11] [The Young Guardian, in Hebrew], which militated for the emigration to the young State of Israel. At a certain point, the communist authorities banned these Zionist organizations. There were some trials, Zionists were investigated and some even went to jail. Unlike others, I chose to write in all my resumes that I had been a member of that organization. And this caused me a lot of problems. For instance, when in college, I couldn’t get elected head of my class or of the student syndicate, because I had declared myself that I had been a member of a Zionist movement. This detail was as disturbing as a tin tied to one’s tail. After graduation there was the same story. When I got drafted, in 1951, I stood before a so-called medical commission (which was in fact a military-political commission) and told them who I was and where I was coming from; the result was that they saw me as an enemy of the people. They refused to understand that being a Zionist wasn’t the same thing as being a fascist or a right-wing extremist. The Romanian Communist Party did not acknowledge Zionism as a movement of national liberation.