ISRAEL-DIASPORA RELATIONS: MUTUAL IMAGES, EXPECTATION, FRUSTRATIONS

The essay outlines the main developments and challenges in the developing relations between the State of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora abroad. With a Jewish population of 650,000 with the establishment of Israel in 1948, the Jewish nation, in the wake of the Holocaust, perceived the new state as a symbol of rebirth and continuity, which must have total support of the Diaspora Jewry for the survival of the Jewish state. Six and a half decades later, half of the Jewish population of the World lives in Israel, which with all its problems, is an advanced high-tech society. Today, Israel became a divisive issue in the Diaspora relating to Israeli policies and politics, and the complex definitions of “who is a Jew”. Israel today supports the Diaspora Jews to preserve and foster their Jewish identity in face of rising assimilation, it needs less the economic support of the well to do communities, but it needs the Diaspora as a pro-Israeli lobby. On the one hand it is a mutual need – if not dependence, on the other hand there is a possibility of the two sides – Israel and world Jewry drifting apart into two entities, with different agendas, priorities, differing perceptions on the meaning of being “Jewish”

Introduction

This volume stems from a conference organized by the Stephen Roth Institute in December 2002 at Tel Aviv University and was the first international conference held in Israel on the Roma. Participants held in-depth discussions on various aspects relating to the history and current situation of the Roma in Europe. Prior to the conference, the editors of this volume, with the support of the German foundation Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, initiated a visit to Israel by a group of ten Ro..

Acknowledgments

Throughout the planning and editing of this volume we were fortunate in having the help and counsel of our colleagues from the Stephen Roth Institute, Tel Aviv University. Prof. Dina Porat, head of the Institute, supported the project from the outset and we are indebted to her for her advice and encouragement. Beryl Belsky, assisted by Yocheved Welber, did an excellent job of preparing the book and bringing it to publication. We wish to express our gratitude to the Friedrich Naumann Foundatio..

Foreword

The genocide of the Roma (Gypsies) at the hands of Nazi Germany and some of its allies, known in Romani as the Porrajmos (catastrophe, very much parallel to the Hebrew term Shoah), has still not been properly and exhaustively researched. Indeed, some historians even deny that it was a genocide. However, if one takes seriously the definition of genocide in the 1948 Convention on the Crime of Genocide, there should be little doubt on that point. The definition speaks of an intent to destroy an ..

The Politics of Memory Jews and Roma Commemorate Their Persecution

INTRODUCTION In The Ethnic Origins of Nations the British historian and sociologist Anthony Smith, a leading theoretician of nationalism, defines ethnic community as “a named human population possessing a myth of common descent, common historical memories, elements of shared culture, an association with particular territory and sense of solidarity.” Although Smith accepts the claim espoused by ‘modernist’ theoreticians of nationalism, such as Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, that nationa..

The Roma: a Minority in Europe

The main issues arising from the encounter between Roma people and surrounding European society since the time of their arrival in Medieval Europe until today are discussed in this work. The history of their persecution and genocide during the Nazi era, in particular, is central to the present volume. Significantly, some authors sought to emphasize the continuing history of prejudice and persecution, which reached a peak during the Nazi era and persisted after the war. Current questions of so..

List of contributors

VIOREL ACHIM is a Senior Researcher at the Nicolae Iorga Institute of History, Bucharest, Romania. His research interests include political and confessional history of southeast Europe in the 13th–15th centuries, ethnic minorities in Romania in the 1930s and 1940s, population policy in Romania during World War II, and history of the Gypsies (Roma) in southeast Europe. He edited (and provided an introductory study to) Documente privind deportarea ţiganilor în Transnistria (Documents Concerning..

The Roma: a Minority in Europe

The main issues arising from the encounter between Roma people and surrounding European society since the time of their arrival in Medieval Europe until today are discussed in this work. The history of their persecution and genocide during the Nazi era, in particular, is central to the present volume. Significantly, some authors sought to emphasize the continuing history of prejudice and persecution, which reached a peak during the Nazi era and persisted after the war. Current questions of social integration in Europe, as well as that of ethnic definition and the construction of ethnic-national identity constitute another principal pillar of the book. The complexity of issues involved, such as collective memory, myth-making and social constructionism, trigger intense debate among researchers dealing with Romani studies. This volume is the result of an international conference held at Tel Aviv University in December 2002. The conference, one of the largest held among the academic community in the last decade, served as a unique forum for a multidisciplinary discussion on the past and present of the Roma in which both Roma and non-Roma scholars from various countries engaged

The History of the Jews in Romania. Vol. II: the nineteenth century

International audienc

The Roma: a Minority in Europe

The main issues arising from the encounter between Roma people and surrounding European society since the time of their arrival in Medieval Europe until today are discussed in this work. The history of their persecution and genocide during the Nazi era, in particular, is central to the present volume. Significantly, some authors sought to emphasize the continuing history of prejudice and persecution, which reached a peak during the Nazi era and persisted after the war. Current questions of social integration in Europe, as well as that of ethnic definition and the construction of ethnic-national identity constitute another principal pillar of the book. The complexity of issues involved, such as collective memory, myth-making and social constructionism, trigger intense debate among researchers dealing with Romani studies. This volume is the result of an international conference held at Tel Aviv University in December 2002. The conference, one of the largest held among the academic community in the last decade, served as a unique forum for a multidisciplinary discussion on the past and present of the Roma in which both Roma and non-Roma scholars from various countries engaged