It was now 1967 in Romania and I was a girl of sixteen. All students and workers were forced by the secret police to celebrate the communist holidays, such as May 1st, August 23rd and Ziua Recoltei (The Day of the Harvest) in the autumn. On the other hand, celebrating the biblical feasts of the Lord, such as Passover (Pesach), Pentecost (Shavuot) and Tabernacles (Sukkot) and teaching their significance to children was forbidden. I heard one thing from the teachers at school and the opposite from my father at home. I continually had to choose what to believe.

My father always put a Jewish calendar on the wall of our bedroom. He also put one up in our church every year.

“Why do you put the Jewish calendar in the church?” I asked him one year.

“It is first of all for you and me, so that we do not forget to observe the Jewish holidays,” he answered. “Also, it is for the brothers and sisters in the Baptist Church, to remind them that the Christian faith has Jewish roots.”
One spring morning I walked the mile to school as usual. I was dressed in my school uniform, a navy-blue dress with a light blue blouse with my personal identification number sewn on my sleeve. The lime trees were in blossom and butterflies flew from flower to flower. The girls’ high school I attended was a grey, two-storey building situated in Copou, a wooded district of Iaşi. I entered the school building and went to my classroom which had wooden floors and white walls. The other thirty-six girls took their places and I went straight to my bench at the back where I sat down next to another Jewish girl.

The bell rang and Mrs Iovin, the natural sciences teacher, came in. She was a skinny, blond lady. I didn’t like her and she didn’t like me.

She started the lesson.

“Science has proved that God does not exist,” she said with pride. “Life appeared at random and evolved from insects and reptiles into birds and animals and then into human beings… There is no God and there is no life after death…”

That’s not what my father taught me, I thought.

I remember once when I was a little girl that I went into the garden. I was disturbed by a bumble bee that came too close to me and I wanted to kill it. My father saw and stopped me just in time…

“Don’t ever kill anything that has life in it for no reason, because life is very precious,” he said. “Our God created us and He created flowers, birds, animals and bumble bees for our delight… This bumble bee you wanted to kill will do you no harm… Besides,” he added with a smile, “he has a wife and children at home and they wait for their dad to come home with nectar from flowers!”

That was the last time I tried to kill a bumble bee. After that I learned to respect life and to admire God’s wonderful creation.

The years in high school were very busy for me. Besides my regular homework, I had to participate in all sorts of compulsory activities which I hated. I also tutored three or four children a week and continued to repair nylons to earn money for my clothes and school materials.

That spring I had to practice with thousands of other students for the May 1st, Communist Workers’ Day celebration. When the practices took place in the streets and around the stadium, all traffic stopped. We dressed in festive costumes of different colors: red, yellow, blue, green, orange and purple. We had to pay homage to the Romanian Communist Party and worship President Ceauşescu every year.

It took weeks of practice to learn how to march in formation to the rhythm of a military brass band. Suddenly the music would stop and the drums would beat. At that signal, every child had to run to his own position and bow down with his face to the ground. It was important to run to the right spot, as each child formed part of a letter of a different color, and the letters spelled words.

The instructors stood on a high platform and directed the practice through loudspeakers. They made us repeat the exercise again and again until it was perfect. With our bodies we wrote: Slavă Partidului Comunist Român! (Glory to the Romanian Communist Party!), Slavă Preşedintelui Republicii Socialiste România! (Glory to the President of the Socialist Republic of Romania!), Slavă Preşedintelui Nicolae Ceauşescu, Aducătorul de Fericire! (Glory to President Nicolae Ceauşescu, Bringer of Happiness!).

I felt exhausted and nauseated after the long hours of practice in the sun.

On the day of the festival the political leaders would receive the worship from high up on the stage where they sat. Some years President Ceauşescu himself would attend, arriving in a helicopter to attend the celebration.
From behind some bushes in a park my father was also watching me. When the practice was over and it was time to go home, he came up to me. I took him by the arm and we walked home together.

“God absolutely forbids us to bow down to any communist god,” he told me. “He is the only One who deserves glory. I thought about stopping you from joining the Pioneers… but if I did that they would take you away and put you in a communist institution.”

He lifted up his eyes to heaven and prayed, “Father, let it rain so hard on May 1st that this abomination is cancelled!”

The Lord heard his prayer. That year it did rain very hard on May 1st and everything was cancelled. How much I rejoiced!

One day a secret policeman called my father to the secret police headquarters.

“You are not allowed to teach your children that Jewish stuff from the Bible” he shouted at him. “Children are only to be educated at school. In the Socialist Republic of Romania children are the property of the state!”
“In the Bible it is commanded that parents teach their children God’s ways” my father replied. “I have to obey God rather than men.”

Every Friday afternoon my father helped my mother clean the house and the yard. Then he washed and changed into his best dark trousers and a white shirt, and waited for the Shabbat to begin.

“Why do you always wear a white shirt on Friday evenings and Saturdays?” I asked him.

“We are Jews and God commanded us to keep the Shabbat for generations to come. Yeshua Himself, our Savior, kept the Shabbat holy,” he explained.

When the Shabbat was over, he was always sad to see it end.

Before Passover I remember how I helped my mother take all the furniture out of the house. She whitewashed the walls and cleaned the whole house, then brought everything back in again. It was a Jewish custom she learned from her mother.

On Passover night my father kept vigil to honor the Lord. He encouraged me and my brothers and sister to do the same.

“What is different about this night?” I asked him.

“God commanded us to remember how He set us free from slavery in Egypt,” he explained. “The Jewish people had to sacrifice a lamb and put the blood on the doorposts and anyone who had the blood on the doorposts was saved. God saved the entire nation from Egypt. In the same way, Yeshua became our Passover Lamb and died in our place. His blood set us free from the slavery of sin.”

My father always brought matzah bread from the synagogue to celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread. It was made without yeast, which represented sin, and it taught us that we have to get rid of the sin in our lives.
Sometimes the Jewish Passover coincided with Orthodox Easter. Then, all night long the city was full of people walking the streets with candles in their hands, telling each other “Cristos a înviat! Adevărat a înviat!” (Christ has risen! He has risen indeed!).

My father remarked, “The Communists force us to celebrate August 23rd as a day of liberation from the Nazis. But it is a joke, because we never got rid of the Nazis. They are still here, dressed in communist clothes, and in their hearts they hate us more than ever.

How much my father tried to teach us the ways of the Lord! I remember one summer that we had cherry trees in our garden with cherries that were almost ripe and I couldn’t wait to eat them. But my father said, “The first fruits have to be given to the Lord.” We gave a handful of cherries to a beggar in the Name of Yeshua.

I heard one thing from the teachers at school and the opposite from my father at home. I continually had to choose what to believe.

Later that summer an old lady, Mrs Iraşog brought us the first fruits from her garden—strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes and a loaf of bread.

I remember as a child one autumn evening… I was at home with my mother and father and brothers and sister. Our house was shaded by trees and we had vine bushes in the yard at the back. We had three rooms and a small kitchen and there were books and musical instruments everywhere.

That evening we all sat around the large table in the back room. My mother laid the table and served cabbage fried with onion, which we ate with corn mush and goat yoghurt. For dessert we had quinces boiled in light syrup. We ate with thanksgiving to the Lord. Then my father drew the curtains. We sang and prayed as usual and he taught us from the Bible.

How much the Communists tried to take away our joy! But I seldom saw my parents sad and I learned from them to trust God and to keep a smile on my face.

Our house was often watched by the secret police. My mother pulled the curtain back for a second and looked through the window. I saw that it was dark outside.

“It’s raining,” she said. “I must go outside and let the chickens into their house for the night.”
But two minutes later the door burst open again and she rushed back into the house, gasping for breath.
“Culiţă!” she said to my father. “There is a rain coat spread out on one of our vine bushes, next to the chicken house… I wonder what it’s doing there…”

“A rain coat, Maria?” he answered. “I need one… Maybe the wind brought it especially for me! Let’s go and see… Come with me, children!”

“Take care,” my mother added. “I think I saw a hand underneath it…”

I followed my father out into the yard and my brothers and sister followed me. I immediately saw the raincoat. My heart beat fast, but I was not scared because my father was there. He went straight to the rain coat, stretched out his right hand and pulled it forcefully toward him… when a man jumped up from underneath! The man wore an elegant suit and a hat.

“Who are you?” asked my father. “What are you doing here?”

I understood immediately that he was a secret policeman who had been listening outside the window. But he did not want to be recognized, so he left his raincoat in the vine bush, covered his face with his sleeve… jumped over the fence… and ran away.

My father didn’t want to let him go that easily. He jumped over the fence too and ran down the street after him. We children were quick to follow.

“Stop or I’ll shoot! Bang! Bang!” joked my father.

“Stop or I’ll shoot! Bang! Bang!” we children repeated.

The man ran as fast as he could and after pursuing him for about a hundred yards, we returned laughing. As we passed by our yard, my father noticed that the spy had lost one of his shoes in the fence. He went to get it. It was a shiny leather shoe.

The next morning my father wrapped the shoe in the expensive raincoat and took it to the secret police.
“One of your colleagues lost these in my yard last night,” my father said. “Would you kindly return them to him?”
“Okay, Mr Sfatcu,” said the embarrassed officer. “Leave them here…”

After that my father was careful what he said in the house. He shared sensitive things with us only as he walked with us in the street or in the park.

I remember how my father always fasted on the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) and taught us to do the same. That year he took us by the hand and we walked all over the city. Every year he did that. We went to the synagogue where prayers for forgiveness were made. In the evening he took us to visit his Jewish friends. We broke the fast with a wonderful meal of borsch, fried fish with garlic sauce, and cozonac, a Romanian sweet bread, at a table covered with a white tablecloth.

We were not allowed to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot), the festival of ingathering of the harvest. Instead, around the same time, we had a communist harvest festival. On that day we had to parade with fruit and vegetables and sing praises to the Communist Party for the bumper crops which they claimed to have produced by their own strength and intelligence.

I remember one autumn when I was a little girl my father told me, “God commanded the Jews to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles and live for seven days in huts made of branches. This reminds us that our people lived in tents in the wilderness when they came out of Egypt. It is to be a time of joy and feasting, a celebration of the time when Yeshua will come again to live with us on earth.

“Go with Dionisie, Aurora, Costică and Tudorică and gather all the branches you can from different kinds of trees,” he told me. “Then we will make a hut, a sukkah.”

I went with my brothers and sister into the forest and we gathered willow, poplar and wild cherry branches. We had to make several trips to carry the branches home, each one bringing an armful.

“That looks like enough for a sukkah,” my father said, when we made a high stack.

My father took four wooden poles and drove them into the ground to make a frame. We then covered it with the branches and decorated it with leaves. We worked very hard to build the sukkah and I was so excited when it was finished. We brought our pillows and blankets and we used leaves and hay as a mattress.

It was a beautiful, warm night. We children all slept in the sukkah with our father. We ate grapes and apples till late. As we settled down for the night, I could see the stars through a hole in the roof. The dogs barked and owls hooted. Even our cat came to sleep there with us. It was the most exciting night of my life!

Early in the morning the rooster and the birds in the trees gave a concert to wake us up. I could not wait for evening to come and to sleep there again. My father told us we could sleep there for seven nights, as long as it didn’t rain.

But the next day a policeman came to our house and asked to talk to my father. He was armed and wore high boots and I was afraid of him. He looked straight at the sukkah and seemed to know what it was.

“Mr Sfatcu, what are you doing with that Jewish stuff?” he asked. “Destroy it at once! That’s an order!”

My father took the sukkah down and never built one in our yard again. I was so sorry. It was so much fun to sleep in it!

The sukkah was destroyed on the orders of the policeman. But the sukkah in my heart remained for ever, along with everything my father told me about Jewish holidays.

Once again I knew for sure that I detested all the communist teachings and practices, but that I adored the God of Israel and everything about Him.

(to be continued)