Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the relationship between top-down and bottom-up processes of public memory building and remembrance of difficult pasts through the lens of heritage-work.

Paper long abstract:

Our socio-historical analysis regarding engagements towards the (re)enactment of the Jewish history in the present and its internalization into the Romanian consciousness draws on concrete top-down and bottom-up actions of memorializing and commemorating the Jewish history during the Second World War in Northern Transylvania. This is a Romanian territory where Jews and Roma people were ghettoized, and then sent directly to extermination camps (mainly to Auschwitz); therefore, a genocide was carried out under the authority of both Horthy's Hungary and Nazi Germany.

The symbolic re-enactment of Jewish history in the public sphere through heritage-making helps remodel perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours in a multi-ethnic society by promoting moral values regarding other human beings such as tolerance and mutual respect. Therefore, by examining private initiatives of heritage-making carried out with the purpose of contributing to the preservation of the memory of Jews killed during WWII and comparing them with the official ones we intend to disclose aspects of the 'social distance' and intercultural communication in Northern Transylvania.