Holocaust Memory in the Post-communist Romanian Orthodox Church
Holocaust Memory in the Post-communist Romanian Orthodox Church

Summary/Abstract: The main aim of this approach is to complete the picture of how the Romanian Orthodox Church (ROC) relates in the post-communist period to the role it played in the interwar period in the unfolding of the Holocaust in Romania. Three models of the Holocaust will be correlated to answer whether the ROC is an optic community in the sense that Eviatar Zerubavel confers to this concept: the institutional model of the Church, the scientific model, and the social model. We consider the institutional model of the Holocaust to be at the intersection of the models corresponding to the two levels of the Church under consideration: clerical (including the episcopal one) and lay. In structuring the episcopal model, we used the thematic analysis of articles dealing with the Holocaust or a related topic in the publications of the Patriarchate and the inland Metropolises, the period of analysis being 1990-2023. For the same period, the social pages of priests, laymen, and laity associations, macro- and micro-social media influencers are analyzed at clerical and lay level. The main conclusion of the analysis of the correspondence between the mnemonic models of the Holocaust mentioned above is that the ROC acts as an optic community. At the same time, the Romanian Orthodox Church shows itself as a mnemonic community that recalls the past regarding the phenomenon of the Holocaust in Romania in a certain way and constrains how this past is recalled.

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