The Jewish Community's Interaction with Romanian National Holidays during the Interwar Period
The Jewish Community's Interaction with Romanian National Holidays during the Interwar Period

Summary/Abstract: The following paper examines the integration of the Jewish minority in Greater Romania in a very specific cultural circumstance, that of national holidays. Seen as ritualistic circumstances, national holidays have, even in a secular state, a strong creative and constitutive function. Therefore, it is interesting to see to what extent this was really successful and integrative, as well as the way in which the Jewish community related to such events. The study mainly analyses articles from the interwar press and focuses its research in two directions. On the one hand it tracks down the frequency with which the papers mention the presence of Jewish people in national holidays, and on the other it examines the speeches and messages that the rabbis delivered at such festivities. As such, halfway through the interwar period one can find that the newspapers acknowledge the Jewish people as an active social and political actor, but as the international situation grows tense, the hostile attitude towards the Jewish people is on the rise and they are scarcely mentioned as participants in national holidays, as if they are not part of the nation anymore. Meanwhile, the speeches the rabbis deliver on such occasions have a pattern embedded with leitmotivs that hardly change over time.

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