IAȘI — Israeli President Isaac Herzog attended a Romanian state ceremony on June 28, 2026, marking the 85th anniversary of the Iași pogrom. The event took place at the Iași Jewish cemetery.

Attendees included representatives of the Romanian government, city leadership, and members of the local Jewish community. Chief Rabbi of Romania Rafael Shaffer opened the ceremony with the recitation of Kaddish.

During his remarks, Herzog referenced the massacre of more than 13,000 Jewish inhabitants of Iași by Nazi-aligned Romanian authorities between June 28 and July 6, 1941. This number represented approximately one-third of Iași's Jewish population at that time. "This act of remembrance for the many thousands of Jewish women, men, children, and elderly murdered on this soil, in Iași and its surroundings between June 28 and July 6, 1941, does not erase the suffering of the victims," Herzog said. "Nor does it lessen the ethical stain of the perpetrators."

"It does not undo the murder, the humiliation, the beatings, or the death trains, orchestrated high up, but unleashed across every level of society, during those infernal summer days, 85 years ago," he said. "Nor does it help us make sense of this simple but burning question: How? How can cruelty of this scope, across an entire society, possibly be comprehended?" Herzog cited the founding of Rosh Pina in northern Israel and Naftali Herz Imber's composition of 'Hatikva' as achievements of Romanian Jews before addressing contemporary issues. "It is therefore all the more alarming that in too many places across Europe, and through the sinister influence of an evil empire that traffics in hatred, antisemitism is again rearing its ugly head," he said.

"The moral infrastructure that humanity established in response to the moral destruction of the Holocaust is weaker than it has been for eighty years," Herzog said. "This is a danger for Jews, this is a danger for all people of goodwill. It is therefore our shared responsibility to recognize and name this danger, to actively embrace the moral calling it invokes, and to fiercely combat it. Let that be the lesson of Iași."

After the speeches concluded, a reburial ceremony was held for newly identified victims of the Iași pogrom. The Jewish community in Iași presently numbers in the hundreds.