Moldova: 14% polled 'really don't like' Jews - survey

Large portions of Moldovans polled in a European Jewish Association (EJA) survey had negative sentiments about Jews, the organization said in the release of its findings on Thursday.

According to the survey, around 14% of the 923 Moldovans polled “really don’t like” Jews, and 19% had negative perceptions of the Jewish people.

Jews are manipulative and exploit the Holocaust

The survey participants also expressed that they believed Jews engaged in a manipulation of society. 36% of respondents said that they felt Jews use dishonest means to achieve their aims, and 32% said that Jews exploit non-Jews. Exploitation allegedly came in part from evoking the Holocaust, with 36% of participants expressing that Jews seek to gain advantage from the World War II genocide, and 37% saying that Jews talk too much about the event.

“The Moldova survey on antisemitism is part of our ongoing efforts to properly map the situation affecting Jews across the continent,” said EJA chairman rabbi Menachem Margolin.“It is sadly clear that – despite some government efforts – deep-rooted antisemitism persists in Moldova. There can be no rational explanation as to why a community that represents such a tiny fraction of the overall population bears the brunt of such an alarmingly high number of stereotypes and tropes.”

The EJA said that the land-locked nation of about 2.5 million people only had around 1,900 Jews, representing only 0.7% of all Moldova’s citizens.

Work on promoting inclusiveness

According to Margolin, while the government had taken action by adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism and by changing the penal code to include the promotion of fascist, racist ideologies as well as public denials of the Holocaust as punishable by law, further change needed to be implemented in classrooms to ensure that the next generation would not perpetuate antisemitic sentiments.

“The Moldovan government has a tough road ahead in eradicating these old antisemitic attitudes that have no place in any modern country, especially one that seeks to join the European Union,” said Margolin.

Notably, the survey was conducted between October 20 and November 14, 2023, and “utilized a stratified, probabilistic sampling method to ensure the sample’s representativeness.”