n Bitola, the second largest city in Macedonia, you will not find a Chabad house, nor a synagogue, and not a single Jewish family is there, so it is not surprising that there will not be a Jewish child in the municipal kindergarten named after Esther Ovadia. Dozens of kindergarten children greeted us yesterday in Jewish holiday singing, and they swam before us with knowledge of many Hebrew words.
This garden, named after a Jewish partisan who has become a national heroine in the style of Chana Szenes, represents another of the anomalies issued by Macedonia. This small and remote country in the Balkans, which most of us hear about once a year in the Eurovision contest, if at all, shares quite a few common values with Israel. By strengthening our ties with our country and the Jewish people, we are trying to tell the world about the Holocaust of the Jews of Macedonia, which is a dusty and unfamiliar corner in the great Holocaust story that we all thought we controlled well.
Macedonia. Shares quite a few common values with Israel. Schaterstock
On Thursday, March 11, 1943, all Macedonian Jews were removed from their homes. 7,350 people, women and children were taken to the Monopol tobacco factory in Skopje, the capital. In three transports that were sent by the end of March in sealed cattle cars to Treblinka, an ancient and intriguing Jewish community, dating back to the 15th century, was wiped off the face of the earth.
The Macedonian Jews received the significant push after the expulsion from Spain. The small country had several dozen families with extensive roots, and they established it in Bitola. When the Greeks ruled here, it was also called Monastir, an important Jewish center where among others the Kabbalist Shlomo Molcho wrote the Magnificent Book.
Very little remains of Macedonian Jewry – when a number of partisans who managed to escape after joining underground forces, or a few miraculously surviving babies, did little more than that. One of them is the sculptor Matti Greenberg, who was born in Bitola a week just before that bitter and reckless day on March 11. Greenberg was a partner this week to the Foreign Ministry delegation to which we joined, whose goal was to cast a spotlight on Macedonian Jewry that was destroyed in one day.
Macedonia is a tiny country, just the size of the State of Israel, with only 2 million people living there. It suffers from difficult ethnic tensions, mainly from about 30 percent of its residents who are Muslim Albanians. If this song sounds familiar to you, it is also true in the case of the Macedonians, who look up at Israel with open admiration. “You manage to deal with so many difficulties that our problems seem small,” said a waiter in the cafe in the modest pedestrian street of Bitola, after it turns out that we are from Israel. “It’s saddening to see how much we have not progressed since the Jews were forced to leave.
The waiter, unpleasant to say, was right. Traveling across the country on its narrow and shabby roads, especially wandering through its two major cities, Bitola and Skopje, creates a feeling of return in the time tunnel. There are cars and the Internet here, but in all other areas life seems to have stopped. The poverty and lack of development are evident everywhere. At a certain point, after several Macedonians who expressed their longing for the Jews of the country, it seemed as if Macedonia had decided to stop in 1943 and move on only after the Jews returned to it.
It probably will not happen so quickly, but perhaps as a substitute for the people and the Macedonian government are making efforts to preserve the memory of the Jews of the state. This is evident first in the huge Holocaust museum that was built in the center of Skopje. In the world, very few Holocaust museums have been built on this level of investment, size and centrality, and the exhibition of Macedonian children’s paintings on the subject of the Holocaust, the partnership of fate with the Jewish people and the sympathy for the State of Israel is one of the most impressive and exciting that we have seen for a long time.
In the absence of Jews in Macedonia, the main project in which pockets and hearts are invested is the restoration of the huge Jewish cemetery in Bitola. There are tombs here from the middle of the 16th century until the Holocaust. Because the place is built on a hillside, in the many years when it was not maintained, the erosion, including the tombstones, led to the bottom of the valley. The sight is strange, sad and surreal: hundreds of gigantic gravestones clumped on top of each other in a terrible mess, with almost every story engraved on them.
The preservation and cleaning project, which was done with the help of quite a few factors, reveals the engraving of the words in stone, almost always written in excellent Hebrew and rarely in Ladino. The family names succeed surprisingly when it comes to a cemetery in Europe: Calderon, Toledano, Confino. An ancient Spanish community that was cut off in one day, and its ancestors do not get rest in peace, swaying and moving in the large, desolate cemetery.
Quite a few people take considerable efforts to clean the dust, preserve the memory, and give due respect to Macedonian Jewry.
The second is Dr. Rachel Levy-Drumer, the academic secretary of Bar-Ilan University and the granddaughter of the famous Jewish doctor of Bitola – the last Jew who lived in the Balkans. In the city until he immigrated to Israel with his family in 1965. I am 41. This week was the first time I heard about the Holocaust of Macedonian Jews, and I think it is not unreasonable to bet that most of you have just become acquainted with the story of 7,350 of our brothers, And we all listen carefully and listen to every word in order to fulfill our duty, every word is important, and every Jew is equally important Remember what Amalek did to you, even in Macedonia. The academic secretary of Bar-Ilan University and the granddaughter of the famous Jewish doctor of Bitola – the last Jew who lived in the city until he immigrated to Israel with his family in 1965. I am 41. This week was the first time I heard about the Holocaust of the Jews of Macedonia. I suppose it would not be absurd to bet that most of you have just been introduced to the story of these 7,350 brothers. Tomorrow they will read Parshat Zachor in the synagogue, and we will all listen carefully and listen to every word in order to fulfill our duty. Every word is important, and every Jew is equally important. Remember what Amalek did to you, even in Macedonia. The academic secretary of Bar-Ilan University and the granddaughter of the famous Jewish doctor of Bitola – the last Jew who lived in the city until he immigrated to Israel with his family in 1965. I am 41. This week was the first time I heard about the Holocaust of the Jews of Macedonia. I suppose it would not be absurd to bet that most of you have just been introduced to the story of these 7,350 brothers. Tomorrow they will read Parshat Zachor in the synagogue, and we will all listen carefully and listen to every word in order to fulfill our duty. Every word is important, and every Jew is equally important. Remember what Amalek did to you, even in Macedonia.
