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Holocaust Museum urges Romania to withdraw coin commemorating 'anti-semitic' patriarch

Romania's central bank has issued a special coin commemorating a prime minister and religious leader who stripped Jews of their citizenship before World War II. The move prompted protest Monday from Romanian Jews as well as a director at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Radu Ioanid, who runs the museum's international archives, said he was "shocked" by the bank's decision to mint the coin depicting late Patriarch Miron Cristea, who led the Romanian Orthodox Church from 1925 to 1939 and was prime minister from 1938-1939.

The patriarch was responsible for revising the citizenship law, stripping about 225,000 Jews — or 37 percent of the Jewish population — of their Romanian citizenship, Ioanid said....

Read entire article at AP