The diaries of the former senior political representative of the United States to Romania from 1944 to 1947, Burton Y. Berry, provide a first-hand account of the communist takeover of Romania, as seen through the eyes of an American diplomat. Born on 31 August 1901 in Fowler, Indiana, Burton Y. Berry completed his studies at Indiana University before joining the United States Foreign Service. From 1928 to 1944 he served in various posts at American diplomatic missions in Turkey, Greece, Iran, and Egypt. In 1944 he was appointed as senior political representative for the United States in Romania, with the personal rank of Minister. As General Cortlandt Van R. Schuyler, the chief of the U.S. military representation on the Allied Control Commission in Romania described it, Berry's primary task was to establish and maintain informed channels with the king and the Romanian government. From this position, Berry witnessed first-hand the events that led to the installation of a communist regim

The Library of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest holds a rare piece of Jewish art from the seventeenth century, an illuminated scroll of the Book of Esther, dated 1673. This manuscript is a unique example in terms of Jewish art because of two distinct components that it exclusively possesses. One of them is the date indicating the year 7181 in Byzantine chronology, which corresponds to the Gregorian calendar year 1673. The second component is the coat of arms of the Principality of Moldavia, placed within the escutcheon in the ornamental section at the beginning of the scroll. These essentially biographic elements indicate an age for this type of megillah, and although this is not the very year when it first took shape, they prevent specialists from oscillating between the 16th, 17th, and the mostly preferred 18th centuries. In addition, the presence of the Moldavian coat of arms in the escutcheon, along with other evidence, points to a Romanian holder, namely Dosoftei, the metropolita