"On Tuesday, we'll mark 121 years since Eminescu's deaths and all this time, the truth about this tragic event was kept hidden. The truth was forged. Eminescu did not die of natural causes, he was assassinated by foreign elements. It was Jews, individuals from the chosen people, who planned the poet's assassination, bothered by Eminescu's political writings and poems. He was poisoned with mercury injections given to him by Francisc Isack, a Jewish doctor," Funar told a press conference.

According to Funar, several medical documents about Eminescu's health condition disappeared from the Romanian Academy's Library.

The PRM leader also said documents at the time show that, in order to get rid of the poet, "his madness was staged and they pushed this idea that he was crazy, they discredited him and then abusively had him committed to various psychiatric sanatoriums, where they subjected him to diabolic procedures of biologic destruction, by giving him toxic chemical substances, including mercury injections, in very large doses, up to four grams of mercury a day."

"Mercury poisoning hurried Eminescu's ending. His death was caused by a blow in the head, by a brick, from a real mental patient, in the yard of Caritatea Hospital in Bucharest, while the poet was having a walk. Other spreaders of false rumors said Eminescu had syphilis, but Romanian doctors said Eminescu did not have this disease," Funar said.

The PRM general secretary also called on Eminescu specialists to publish "the name, first name and real identity of those who assassinated Mihai Eminescu" and said "the truth must be known and people must know who assassinated him and those who plotted his assassination must not be forgiven."

"I am not an anti-Semite, I have nothing against Jews, no problems with them, but the truth must be known. If Jewish descendants of those who assassinated him admitted to the deed and apologized to the Romanian people, it would be even better," he said.

Funar also quoted several articles Eminescu published in newspaper 'Timpul' in 1881, in which he wrote that "the race that determines this country's fate is no longer Romanian, but Romanianized foreigners."

In response, the executive director of "Elie Wiesel" Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania, Alexandru Florian, told Mediafax that Funar's statements are unquestionably part of the anti-Semite message canons, they have a general nature and Jews as a people are accused of the death of Eminescu. "It's typical phrasing for the anti-Semite message," Florian added.

Bucharest Herald