The Jewish community in Romania has expressed anger over the decision to appoint Senator Dan Sova, who has made anti-Jewish statements on a number of occasions, as the government liason to the parliament.

Sova, a member of the Romanian Social-Democratic party (PSD), said in a television interview earlier this year that “no Jew suffered on Romanian soil during World War II.”

Discussing a pogrom in the city of Yashi in 1941, in which some 15,000 Jews were killed, Sova said that “a total of 24 Jews were killed, on the orders of German soldiers.” Sova, a leading spokesperson for the PSD, was suspended from party leadership as punishment. The PSD sent him to Washington, to visit the National Holocaust Museum. After that visit, Sova issued a statement in which he expressed regret at having made “misstatements,” but he refused to apologize for his comments.

Speaking to Yediot Achronot, a top official of the Jewish community of Bucharest said that “we are angry and upset at the promotion of a man who on several occasions has spoken very negatively about the Jewish community. It is clear that his comments were not a mistake, as he claimed. In fact, making comments denying that Jews were killed in the Holocaust is against the law in most places. Only in Romania is it possible to make such statements and to be named within a short time to a high government post,” the official said.