Items

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  Photos confiscated from Seventh-Day Adventist Soldier Romania

  The first image is a photograph of Ignat Neculai and his family from Moșna, Falciu county. He is photographed with his wife, and four children, one of whom is in regional dress. Ignat’s name is written on the edge of the photo. The other image is a photograph of some soldiers, Sergeant Gheorghe Sorin, Captain Costache Jugnaru, and Costache Pițu, from Battalion I, Regiment 25, Company 4, stationed in Moșna. Their names are also written in pen along the edge of the photograph. The third image is a photographic negative of a group of officers from Iași taken at Christmas. On the back of each item there is a handwritten description. The photos were used in a court case brought against Stefan Neculai. Neculai was twenty-eight years old, married with two children, and originally from Cuza Voda, Ialomița County but resident in Vaslui City. He made a living as a photographer but he had failed to obtain the required authorisation to possess a camera. The fact that he took photos of soldiers also made him suspicious. The three photos mentioned were taken between December 1939 and February 1940. Neculai was apprehended at the Seventh-Day Adventist prayer house in Moșna village on 10 February 1940 and taken to court. Based on the documents in the case file it is unclear what the outcome of the case was. Neculai’s police testimony and that of witnesses are included in the file. Among them is the statement of a Jewish regimental tailor Sami Segal, at whose shop Neculai had lodged for six days. The odds were not in Neculai’s favor. As an Adventist he was considered a sectarian with foreign ties and therefore potentially dangerous to state security. His affiliation with the Jewish tailor during a time of rabid antisemitism also made his activity suspicious to the authorities. Seventh-Day Adventists were outlawed during the war and Neculai’s case is evidence of increased concern regarding religious minorities. Reports on other suspicious sectarian soldiers are also included in the folder. The photographs come from ANIC, DGP inv. 2349, 40/1930. The file includes police reports, correspondence between local gendarme commanders and the General Police Division in Bucharest. Personal files on soldiers with a sectarian background enrolled in the army between 1928 and 1940 are also available in the folder.
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  Postcard sent from detention by Romanian Old Calendarist nun

  These images show a postcard sent by an Old Calendarist nun to her family whilst in detention. It is a particularly sensitive letter as it conveys the struggles of the nun who appears to have been rejected by her parents for reasons that are not clear from the information we have. The first image shows the face of the postcard and it contains references to the sufferings that the nun had endured for the last two years. From the message that she wrote to her parents, she seems to accuse them of having forgotten about her during these hardships and she reminds them that she is still their daughter and shares the same rights as her other sisters. The reason for her being treated like this by her parents are not described in the postcard but she makes a statement that might hint at it: “ I always cry and pray to God that He won’t abandon you, that you will get to know the good and the bad.” The statement could imply that her parents were religious and disagreed with her decision of becoming a nun or that they might have accepted the New Calendar, thus putting them at odds with her adherence to the Old Calendar. The second image shows the back of the postcard. It contains information that makes it clear that the postcard was sent from Vărzărești Monastery, one of the Orthodox monasteries where Old Calendarist nuns were detained and, according to some Old Calendarist literature, forced to accept the New Calendar. The nun asks her family to come and visit her, she wishes them happy holidays and asks for forgiveness. This postcard offers us a glimpse of the emotions and personal challenges faced by nuns and women who rejected the Orthodox Church calendar reform. This is contrasted by the very different image of Old Calendarist women that was portrayed in the press and Orthodox Church publications of the time. The author of this postcard chose to suffer because of her religious convictions. Although the archives do not preserve a reply to her postcard and we are not aware of her fate, she seems convinced that there is reason to her suffering for her faith. This is a recurrent theme in the letters and postcards written by Old Calendarist women in detention. These images can be found in the file ANIC, Insp. Gen. al Jand., D 25/1937. Apart from this postcard, it contains many more letters and postcards sent or received by Old Calendarist nuns that were detained at various Orthodox Monasteries in Romania. For related entries see:
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  Confiscated postcard written by Romanian Old Calendarist nun

  These images show a postcard sent by an Old Calendarist nun to her family in which she describes how she was arrested and sent to an Orthodox Monastery. The postcard was confiscated and attached to a file that contains many such postcards. They all date from approximately same period of time between 1936 and 1937. The first image represents the face of the postcard and includes important details about the fate of the nun. She describes to her family how she was arrested, where she was taken and what the conditions at the Monastery were like. Arrested by the Gendarmes on her way to the post office, the nun was taken from Oniceni (Neamț county) to Ciolanu Monastery (Buzău county), where all her things were confiscated. There were 70 nuns there altogether who were put into four rooms. She had to share a room with 20 other nuns. The second image shows the reverse of the postcard. It offers important information about the regime that the nuns lived under at the Monastery. She asks her parents to write back to her, but carefully, as their letters are first read by someone else implying that she may suffer consequences if the letter contained anything compromising. The image shows how the nun filled the entire postcard writing in order to convey as much information as possible. On the right edge of the back of the postcard she wrote a cramped note asking her family who was still alive in the village. This may have been due to her wish to pray for anyone that was deceased, or it might be a direct hint at the policy of violent repression and arrests that the Old Calendarist church was subjected to on the part of the Gendarmes. Written in 1937, a short time after a series of so-called Stilist "rebellions" in Besserabia, this postcard is proof of the waves of arrests that followed these events, which sometimes included nuns and Old Calendarist women. When caught by the Gendarmes in the woods, or during Silist agitations, women were arrested and most of the time fined or sent to detention in Orthodox Monasteries. Vărzărești Monastery was one of the main places where Old Calendarist nuns were brought and according to some Old Calendarist literature, they were forced to accept the New Calendar there. The intimate and private lives of the nuns in detention revealed by these postcards contrasts sharply with the way they were portrayed in the press of the time as dangerous and rebels. These images can be found in the file ANIC, Insp. Gen. al Jand., D 25/1937. Apart from this postcard, it contains many more letters and postcards sent or received by Old Calendarist nuns that were detained at various Orthodox Monasteries. For related entries see:
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  Confiscated Brethren Magazine Bucharest

  The images show a Brethren publication entitled Viață și Lumină volume three, issue nine from September 1930. According to the text on the cover, the publication appeared once a month and was edited by Florea Moisescu with administrative facilities in Bucharest under the direction of Gheorghe Teodorescu. Scripture references from the Gospel of John are included under the title, from which the latter is derived. The subscription cost was 60 lei per year in Romania and one dollar in America. This issue, along with two others, were included in the file composed by the General Police Division on the Norwegian Society Norske Israelmision. The society was a missionary organization aimed at converting Jews to Christianity that received authorization from the Ministry of Religious Denominations through order nr. 15486/1565/930. Their representative in Romania was Isaac Feinstein, a Romanian citizen of Jewish ethnicity, born in Dorohoi, whose memoranda to the government requesting freedom for the society to function in the cities of Reni and Iași is included in the file. Another letter from Feinstein to the Ministry of Interior included in the file protests the application of decision nr. 4781 from 1937 to their activity. The aforementioned decision was passed to limit the activity of religious minorities or sects, which Feinstein argued his organization was not. The Brethren publications are not mentioned anywhere else in the file. They were likely gathered by police informers during one of Feinstein’s Norske Israelmision meetings. The Brethren religious minority was considered a sect with foreign allegiance and strictly monitored during the 1930s and outlawed by the Ion Antonescu government in 1940. The placement of the publications with the police correspondence and memoranda concerning the Norwegian society implicates both groups in what could be considered activity threatening state security. Feinstein’s Jewish ethnicity is continually brought up in reports included in the file revealing the police’s intention (as also expressed in other files) of finding a link between the Jewish threat and the sectarian threat. The publication comes from file ANIC, DGP inv. 2349, 51/1930. The file includes two other Brethren publications, police reports, correspondence between the Ministry of Interior-General Police Division, the Bucharest Regional Inspectorate, and the Galați Municipal Police, as well as letters sent by Isaac Feinstein to the Ministry of Interior. For related entries see:
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  Confiscated postcard of Old Calendarists in Bălți County

  This photograph, reproduced as a postcard, was confiscated by the police in 1936, from Pavel Caras, a former monk, who was wandering the villages in Bessarabia distributing these post cards to people. The photo was taken during the 1930s in Albineț, Bessarabia(today Republic of Moldova), which was one of the most important centres of Old Calendarist activity during the period. It depicts the Old Calendarists from Albineț standing in front of their church which appears to be under construction. The photo contains a small description in the lower right hand corner which states: ”In memory of the Church in Albineț, followers of the old calendar”, without mentioning the specific date or year when the photo was taken. Even though little information is given about its context, there are small details that reveal important aspects about the community and about the event captured in the photo. We can see that one man holds a bucket in his hand, which may contain holy water, that could indicate that the community was celebrating the consecration of their church. Considering the opposition that the Old Calendarists were facing during the 1930s, the priest in the photo might have been a local one, or he might have traveled to Albineț from a nearby village. It was common practice at this time for priests to move from one village to another. These activities were followed closely by the secret police. The composition of the photograph suggests that the members of this Old Calendarist church cooperated with the photographer, as all of them face the camera, while some of them are even smiling, preparing to capture this important event in the life of their small community. Even though this photograph seems to depict a peaceful and relatively small community of Old Calendarist believers, the reality is that Albineț was considered one of the most dangerous places in Bessarabia during the 1930s. The Old Calendarists in the area were deemed rebellious and dangerous, defenders of Nicolae Climovici and Ieremia Pletosu, two of the most important priests, looked for by the Gendarmerie. According to the archival documents, the photo was used by the Old Calendarist church in Albineț as a propaganda tool, in an attempt to draw attention to itself, for which reason they chose Pavel Caras as their main colporteur. These images can be found in the ANIC, Inspectoratul General al Jandarmeriei, D 25/ 1935. Apart from these images, the file also contains declarations, newspaper articles and Gendarmerie reports about the problems caused by the Old Calendarists in Bessarabia. For related entries see:
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  Inochentist postcard-icons Transnistria

  The images show postcards and mass produced photographs confiscated from a group of arrested Inochentists in February 1942 in the village of Cuibușor, in Romanian-occupied Transnistria. Image 1 and 2 show the front and reverse of a postcard. On the front, the monk Inochentie (1875-1917) is shown in a scene from his vernacular hagiography in which he is under arrest, surrounded by Tsarist soldiers after his attempted to escape from exile on Solovetsky island. The reverse of the postcard, comprises short quotes and adaptations from the New Testament. Here text and image were configured in a relationship designed to establish a parallel between Inochentie’s suffering and the passion of Jesus Christ. The text opens with an abridged and slightly altered version of Jesus’ discourse on the Good Shepherd from John 10: 14-16. In the section of the text that follows, this is taken one stage further with the torments suffered by Inochentie being equated to Christ’s passion. “Behold, the good shepherd whose life was given and is not given back. By his spiritual brothers, chased, cursed, shot [with a gun], insulted, given poison to drink, with hands tied behind his back, put in prison because he revealed the truth, not heeding what the Apostle says: Whoever hates his brother is a murderer, and the murderer will not enter the Kingdom of God (1 John 3: 15).” Image 3 is a photograph-icon of Inochentie that shows him with angels wings and a dove at his heart, a symbol which indicates his association in Inochentist belief with the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. This type of mass produced photo-postcard image were widely used by Inochentists to spread their message. These were carried from village to village across the Moldovan countryside, easily concealed about their person. There are reports of them being sold on markets from suitcases. Hidden under officially sanctioned religious icons and booklets, they were sold to knowing customers ‘on-request’ for the price of 10 lei. The Holy Synod took very seriously the danger posed by these subversive and heretical images and texts being produced by religious dissenters, not only Inochentists but also Old Calendarists, and passed a ruling in 1936, to be enforced by the Ministry of Internal Affairs through the Gendarmerie, requiring all religious icons, crosses and religious publications to be approved by the Church. Arrests were frequently made on the basis of possession of illegal icons and Inochentists were, by the 1940s, routinely sent to the military courts where they received anything between a small fine to 6 months in a labour camp. The file from which these items come reports the arrest of a group of 41 Inochentists, 9 men and 32 women, in an illegal “prayer house” in the village of Cuibușor. The village was located adjacent to the underground Inochentist complex of Gradina Raiului (the Garden of Paradise) that had been destroyed by the Bolsheviks in 1919/20. The area had recently been occupied by Romania following the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. In the 1942, there were a series of arrests of Inochentists from Bessarabia (which had become part of Greater Romania following the First World War) as they began to gather around their sacred centres of Balta and Gradina Raiului. It was illegal for Bessarabians to travel to the occupied territories without travel papers. The Romanian authorities noted that the rumour of deportation of sectants from Romania to Transnistrian concentration camps alongside Jews and Roma (Gypsies) seemed to have inspired some Inochentists to relocate to the place of origin of their movement. Both the postcard and the groups relocation to their sacred centre are expressions of the apocalyptic expectations of the group that intensified with the start of World War Two. These images come from the National Central Historical Archives of Romania [Archiva Naționale Istorice Centrale – fond. Inspectoratul General al Jandarmeriei (Romania) [Central National Historical Archive – General Inspectorate of the Gendarmerie], dosar. 120/1942, pp. 22-26. Alongside the two items reproduced here, there is a third postcard-icon and a brief description of other religious materials found at the hidden prayer house. For related entries see: