WE REMEMBER THE PAST TO TRANSFORM THE FUTURE
Paweł Sawicki
In March, a new Holocaust Museum was opened in Skopje, Macedonia. It commemorates the pre-World War II local Jewish community of 8,000 people that was almost entirely destroyed during the Holocaust. Paweł Sawicki talked to Michael Berenbaum, one of the co-authors of the new museum, about its development.
98% of the Jews of Macedonia were murdered in Treblinka during the Holocaust. Today the Jewish community there is very small. Can you see any specificity in the memory that has been shaped there? The new museum tells the long history of Macedonian Jews - an ancient community which is a history in itself, isn’t it?
The history of Macedonian Jewry is indeed ancient and that story is told in the Museum. The oldest known synagogue outside of the Land of Israel is in Stobi, Macedonia, a 45-minute drive from Skopje. The Museum displays a replica of the synagogue’s pillar and its inscription. St. Paul preached in Macedonia during the first century CE. Macedonian Jews also trace their roots to Spain, where Jews, Christians and Muslims lived in an economically, artistically and intellectually enriching harmony: studying each other’s philosophy and scholarship; writing religious and secular poetry in Arabic; preserving Greco-Roman civilization for Christian Europe, such as the writings of Plato and Aristotle, as well as Thucydides. The Museum tells this story, as well as the story of the Expulsion.
The Jews of Spain were expelled in 1492 by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, and from Portugal in 1497. Bayezide II, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, sent ships to welcome Jews who brought with them the printing press, steel, commerce, medicine and trade. A replica of the printing press is featured in the Museum. The Jews in the Balkans preserved their own Spanish traditions and spoke Ladino, a Judeo-Spanish language, much in the way Yiddish was spoken among Ashkenazi Jews. Visitors see the costumes the Jews wore, they hear the songs that were sung and the proverbs that depicted daily life and Ladino culture.
The most important Jewish artefact in the Balkans, the Sarajevo Haggadah, is an illuminated manuscript of the Passover Seder service, commissioned in Spain in 1350. It was sent into exile along with its owners during the Inquisition in 1492 and made its way to Italy. It came to the Balkans and was saved from destruction three times: during World War I, during the Holocaust and during the siege of Sarajevo in 1990. Both in World War II and in Sarajevo, Muslims risked their lives to save this Jewish artefact that tells the story of Passover - the saga of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt, the archetypal story of freedom. The Museum features a film first aired on ABC's 'Nightline' that tells the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah and its repeated rescue.
The Balkans were also where Shabbatei Tzvi, the false Messiah, founded his popular movement. When confronted in 1666 with the choice between conversion to Islam or death, he chose to convert, much to the astonishment of his followers. The grave of his “John the Baptist” - Nathan of Gaza - who preached and publicized Shabbatei Tzvi’s Messianic mission, was just a few hundred metres from where the Museum now stands, before it was swallowed up in the 1963 earthquake that destroyed Skopje’s Jewish quarter, which was already bereft of its Jews.