Jehovah's Witnesses Association of Romania

A Kingdom Hall in Târgovişte.

The Jehovah's Witnesses Association of Romania (Romanian: Organizaţia Religioasă "Martorii lui Iehova" din România) is a religious body in Romania and one of its eighteen officially-recognised religious denominations. According to the organisation, it had some 38,000 adherents as of 2008. They have 569 congregations, 30 circuits and two districts (see Organizational structure of Jehovah's Witnesses). Every congregation's activity is supervised by a group of elders named by the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses and who hold services at the group's Bucharest headquarters. There are 265 Kingdom Halls in Romania and 111 spaces rented for religious services. Both The Watchtower and its companion magazine Awake! are published in Romanian.

History

Jehovah's Witnesses first appeared in present-day Romania through Hungarian missionaries in Transylvania. Meanwhile, Bible Student groups were active in the Romanian Old Kingdom prior to World War I, and there remain groups under that name in Romania today. In 1920, Ioan B. Sima, a former Greek-Catholic, was sent from the United States to organise the community, which was divided into four groups in the 1930s. The interwar period of Greater Romania saw repeated bans of the group by the government. As a result of their conscientious objection, the Ion Antonescu regime targeted Jehovah's Witnesses with persecution during World War II. A rare moment of freedom came in 1945-46, when the Witnesses were able to openly publish their literature in Romanian, an opportunity that closed after the new Communist regime did not include them among the official religious communities in 1948. With their considerable following, they at times caused great paranoia with their vigorous critiques of ecclesiastical, social and political institutions. While the authorities could probably have tolerated their radical millenarianism, their opposition to military service and especially what officials understood as the Witnesses' attitude to the Romanian state were found unacceptable. Their apocalyptic pronouncements sounded threatening to previous Romanian governments and subversive to the Communist regime. Myths were propagated in elite circles to the effect that the Witnesses were prepared to become personally involved in overcoming the powers of darkness and to bring to a consummation the climactic eschatological moment.

In an interview with the World Council of Churches' official magazine, Metropolitan Antonie Plămădeală of the dominant Romanian Orthodox Church said that gaining official recognition would have been very difficult for the Witnesses because of their attitude toward the Communist state and to military service, but it would not have been impossible if the state had understood their views better and been much less paranoid. He claimed that as long as they kept a low profile and were not active against the state, the authorities were unconcerned about them. In fact, officials did maintain close surveillance of the community, subjected its members to intense harassment and discrimination, and were able to deprive them of all their civil rights whenever the moment appeared convenient or opportune. They used the media and a variety of coercive methods against the Witnesses. For instance, an authoritative American source reported in 1975 that there were "heavy persecutions" in a number of major cities, including brutal beatings, continuous questioning for fifty or more hours at a time, and physical torture, as well as many hundreds of house searches throughout the country and seizure of religious literature. The Governing Body tried to negotiate with the Romanian government on behalf of their fellow Witnesses, but their communications remained unanswered. No precise figures are available as to the size of the movement under Communism, but it was large enough to create considerable apprehension for officials. By the 1980s, one source of converts to the Witnesses, as well as to Protestant denominations, was the new working class housed in urban high-rise settlements; the Orthodox hierarchy was reluctant to take care of this group's religious needs.

Following the Romanian Revolution of 1989, the Witnesses received legal status in 1990 as a religious association. Pursuant to a ruling by the Supreme Court of Justice in 2000, the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs granted the group official recognition in 2003, the first denomination so recognised since the aftermath of the Revolution. The period since 1989 has been marked by opposition to the Witnesses from the Orthodox Church, which views such groups as "heretical sects" and objects to their "aggressive proselytism". For instance, the Orthodox Church used its influence with the authorities to cause them to cancel a planned international convention of Jehovah's Witnesses that had been scheduled to take place in Bucharest in July 1996.

References

• Gallagher, Tom. Modern Romania: The End of Communism, the Failure of Democratic Reform, and the Theft of a Nation. NYU Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8147-3172-4
• Earl A. Pope, "Protestantism in Romania", in Sabrina P. Ramet (ed.), Christianity under Stress. Vol. III: Protestantism and Politics in Eastern Europe and Russia: The Communist and Postcommunist Eras, Duke University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-8223-1241-7
• Sabrina P. Ramet, "Church and State in Romania", in Henry F. Carey (ed.), Romania since 1989: Politics, Economics, and Society, Lexington Books, 2004. ISBN 0-7391-0592-2