Dan Mizrahy

Bucharest, Romania
Interviewed by Anca Ciuciu

Read the biography
View the family pictures here.

“And in that chasm lived their hate.”

Here is a story that deeply marked me in my childhood. When I was eleven or twelve, my father wanted to surprise me and took me to a boxing match. I had never been to such an event before and I have never been since.

Moti Spakov, then the heavyweight champion of Romania, was fighting an African. I can’t remember who won and it doesn’t matter. What matters – and this I cannot forget – is that all around me, scores, hundreds of ‘patriotic’ Romanian spectators were yelling: ‘Hit the jidan [offensive word for Jew in Romanian]! Let the jidan have it!’ These were my neighbors; the people I lived next to.

Suddenly I realized the chasm that stood between us. And in that chasm lived their hate. All the years that passed didn’t manage to soften the shock I had that night.

Dan Mizrahy studied at the Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in Bucharest then fled to Jerusalem during World War II, where he continued his studies in the Jerusalem Academy of Music. He returned to Bucharest at war’s end.