Abstract: The subject of mental formation of an image about the Other brings together and creates a relationship between areas seemingly not in an obvious connection, such as Cultural Anthro- pology, Imagology, Sociology, and the area of Communication Studies. In other words, the essence of intercultural communication and research is understanding how cultures, subcultures, or, better said, groups generally communicate to others and among themselves. Because any communication is fundamentally intercultural, it means accepting the Other, understanding the cultural game differences and different ways of thinking. Having the central focus of analysis on imagology and ethno-psychology, the theme of the research is to show how the Jewish community of Romania has built their auto-image and hetero-image in recent years. This contributes to observing the construction of identity through multiple attributions that make a differentiating picture. The study aims to show how the identity and alterity are built through images about the Self and images about the Other. This type of analysis has been applied in various ways to different ethnic or cultural communities, as members issued their own perceptions of the world and of alterity, conceptualized through images and symbols. Images about ourselves and about the others have an important role in social construction and they result of, and depend on, how we relate and communicate with the Other. If the socio-mythical-economic portrait of the “Jew” has been so far widely discussed in Andrei Oişteanu’s work (2004), which is based on the stereotypical image of the Jews in European culture until the early 1970s – 1980s, this paper tries to illustrate how the image of the Romanian Jewish community is being perceived today. This research is part of a larger study dealing with life stories as means of intercultural communication and has as a central point the stories of the Shoah survivors.
Abstract: It is a fact, that the Holocaust of European Jews has marked in various ways the Jewish diaspora and the Jewish presence worldwide. In the case of the Jews who live in Greece and especially in the city of Thessaloniki, though the Community delayed to break silence about this traumatic historic event, this fact was never let slip from memory. In the public sphere of action, the updating of Holocaust takes place through community actions at first hand and, later, through initiatives from local authorities, by making mnemonic and memorial donations. For the past seventy-four years, Holocaust inheres as a memory in three post-war Jewish generations in Thessaloniki and seals diversely the identity of the social subjects. This mnemonic event in collaboration with the social and politic developments and turmoils, describes the identity of the Jewish element, both directly and indirectly. The presentation will be focused on qualitative empirical data of fieldwork, from a sociological analysis perspective. More specifically, in this paper it will be explored the way in which, the Holocaust of the Greek Jewry emphasizes on the individual and collective responsibilities and, at the same time, it’s function as a contemporary conservation mechanism of the Jewish identity, a cohesive bond of the Greek-Jewry in Thessaloniki.
