Abstract: The text examines the formation of new Jewish identity in Bulgaria during the period of transition after 1989. It explores the dynamic concept of collective identity, studying on the one hand the institutional environment that is a set for development of new identity. On the other hand, apart from the sociological aspects, the analysis includes hermeneutical facets in the form of retrospective reevaluation of individual lives, collective memory difficulties, narrative constructions of the biographic discourse and its relations to the identity as well as the communication between the generations. The article produces generational rhetoric, which occurs in a public Jewish life as a key for the understanding of phenomena of the new Jewish identity as an ideological construct. In this respect, the concept of new Jewish identity is presented as a complex structure that demands understanding both the social milieu and the typology of the experience of the Jewish belonging (taking into account different individuals, different social groups and ages). That is how the research is aimed at displaying the dialectics between people’s own life, the community life, their historical zigzags and institutional manifestations. Thus the new Jewish identity is presented both as a official religious and historical narrative, transmitted trough ideological channels by the new Jewish organizations and a function in a specific Bulgarian-Jewish context, in which generation groups with a different life perspective come acros
