Abstrakt
Research on the fate of the Jews during World War II has long dominated Holocaust studies, whereas significantly less attention has been paid to the period after the Holocaust and the consequences it had for survivors. However, returning home, interacting with members of the often-hostile social majority, and suffering emotional deprivation presented another trauma they had to deal with.
Conditions for the reconstruction of destroyed Jewish communities and survivors' prospects for leading a "normal" life varied from country to country. Here local political will was important, but the ideological division of Europe and the beginning of the Cold War played a major role, too.
In this paper, I examine the situation of socialist Yugoslavia and its Jewry from various perspectives. By using secondary literature as well as oral history methods, I have tried to assess the transformations of Jewish identity/ies in the socialist period and the factors that influenced these processes.
It is argued that the (self-)perception of being a Jew changed dramatically after World War II; however, the political and social climate in Yugoslavia did not lead to complete assimilation. Most Yugoslav Jews self-identified with both Yugoslavism and Jewishness, which were not seen as contradictory.
Jewish identity ceased to be associated with religion, with Judaism, and instead started to be dominated by historical and cultural aspects of Jewishness and by the collective experience of the Holocaust to some extent.