Jehovah's Witnesses Association of Romania

Jehovah's Witnesses Association of Romania (Romanian: Organizația Religioasă "Martorii lui Iehova" din România) is the formal name used by Jehovah's Witnesses for their operations in Romania, with a branch office located in Bucharest. It is one of eighteen officially recognised religious denominations in the country. According to a national census held in 2011, it has 49,820 adherents, making it the country's tenth-largest denomination. Each congregation is supervised by a group of elders appointed by the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses. The magazines The Watchtower and Awake! are both published in Romanian.

Bible Student groups first appeared in present-day Romania through Hungarian missionaries in Transylvania. In particular, two emigrants who in 1911 returned from the United States to their hometown of Târgu Mureș (Marosvásárhely) managed to convert local Hungarians to their creed. They published the first edition of The Watchtower in Hungarian in 1914, with the first Romanian version coming out two years later, also in Târgu Mureș. Similar groups were also active in the Romanian Old Kingdom prior to World War I, and there remain groups under the "Bible Student" name in Romania today. In 1920, Ioan B. Sima, a former Greek-Catholic, was sent from the United States to organise the community, which was divided into four groups in the 1930s. After the Union of Transylvania with Romania in 1918, the headquarters moved to Cluj, with the first Watch Tower Society set up there two years later, its congregation mainly Hungarian. The society functioned as a regional hub, coordinating activities for Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania. Following a leadership dispute in the Bible Student movement in the United States, those who remained associated with the Watch Tower Society became known as Jehovah's witnesses in 1931.

...
Wikipedia