The Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (otherwise known by its Hungarian acronym RMDSZ) expressed its solidarity with Maia Morgenstern, the director of the State Jewish Theater in Romania, after she received a death threat via email on Saturday. “The RMDSZ stands by Maia Morgenstern and the entire community of the State Jewish Theater,” RMDSZ President Hunor Kelemen wrote in a Facebook post on Sunday.
On Saturday, Morgenstern, who is one of the most esteemed and celebrated stage and film actresses in Romania, published on her Facebook page the spiteful message filled with anti-Semitic insults, which was sent on March 27, the first day of the feast of the Jewish Passover (Pesach). In the hatemongering email, both she and the members of the company were threatened with death. The text was sent to the email address of the theater, and the sender had signed it on behalf of the far-right party called the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (otherwise known by its Romanian acronym AUR).
However, soon after Morgenstern published the email, AUR disavowed the message, the Agerpres news agency reported. According to a post published on the party’s Facebook page, AUR expressed its solidarity with the actress, “who is deeply respected and much appreciated by its members.”
“The sender of the email is not a member of AUR, and the defamatory note was meant as provocation; the author of this message should be strictly punished, without delay, according to the law,” noted AUR.
“RMDSZ stands beside Maia Morgenstern and the theater company. Although I am certain that the people who resort to death threats fueled by anti-Semitic motivation are a minority at present, we cannot remain silent and indifferent. We have to bear in mind that throughout history, the most disgraceful events happened when the majority of a society remained indifferent and showed no solidarity with those being persecuted,” Hunor Kelemen wrote in his post.
On Monday, the Agerpres agency reported that the prosecutors working with a court in Bucharest have already ordered the arrest of an individual in the case. As the prosecution noted in a communiqué on March 27, the suspect sent an anti-Semitic email from his own address, in which he formulated a death threat and also threatened other types of injury. This person is accused of the crime of threatening (editor’s note: the crime of intentionally or knowingly putting another person in fear of bodily injury or death).”
Title image: Internationally, Maia Morgenstern is best known for portraying the Virgin Mary in Mel Gibson‘s The Passion of the Christ.
