This history is recounted in the Museum along with a depiction (for an overwhelmingly non-Jewish audience) of the formative ideas and teachings of Judaism and the practices of Jews. It includes the role the Jews played in the Balkans and the distinguished Jewish communities of Monastir (current day Bitola), Stip and Skopje. This history also includes the Bulgarian occupation and the unique fate of Macedonian Jews during the Holocaust.
Is the Ladino spirit present in the exhibition?
Ladino culture, its traditions, language, music and dress, are featured in the Museum. Common proverbs are used to recount the daily life of Macedonian Jews - describing relations between men and women and between Jews and non-Jewish neighbors, to give a sense of the Jewish home where Ladino was spoken, and to pay homage to its great traditions.
Ladino culture and language were virtually destroyed during the Holocaust. The language has enjoyed a slight revival in Jewish culture and among scholars, but unlike Yiddish, which has been preserved by Haredi Jews who speak it as a daily language, there are few Jews who continue to speak Ladino in daily life.
The core of the history of the destruction of Macedonian Jews are three deportations by train in March 1943. This is the epicenter of the tragedy. What is the broader context of events?
As Museum creators, my design partner Edward Jacobs and I were deeply mindful of describing the Macedonian Jewish experience during the Holocaust in context, therefore we had to depict what was happening outside Macedonia. Twice we present in detail the entire story of the Holocaust. The first time is in an exhibition that presents a significant film on the rise of Nazism from end of World War I to the invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is the Museum’s presentation on the Holocaust of Macedonian Jewry.
We begin with the Bulgarian occupation, including survivor testimonies about the beginning of the war, life under occupation, and the daily struggle to survive. Bulgaria granted Bulgarian citizenship to all Macedonians, except Jews. They imposed special taxes and penalties on the Jews and forced them to wear Jewish Stars.
On March 11, 1943 they deported Jews from their homes into a ghetto at the Monopol tobacco factory in Skopje, where, for less than a fortnight, they incarcerated some 7,300 Jews, and then deported 7,144 Jews to Treblinka where all 7,144 were murdered. Not a single person who boarded those trains returned from Treblinka -- not one. The only Jews who survived in Macedonia had gone into hiding, joined the resistance, held foreign passports or were physicians and pharmacists, indispensable and irreplaceable for the health of country.
Visitors then descend a flight of stairs that leads to an exhibition about Monopol ghetto. Suitcases, filled with possessions the Jews brought with them, hang open from the ceiling, displaying how the entire life of the Jew were condensed into a single suitcase. Visitors view survivor testimonies about life in during the three weeks they spent in Monopol and watch another film about the deportation to Treblinka and the experience on the freight train car to a the death camp.
On display are the actual Monopol windows from which 6 year-old Isaak Adizes watched the deportation of his family and we hear his testimony. We see the original envelopes Jews filled out with lists of their property and the receipts given by the Bulgarians to them to fool them into believing that all would be returned.
And then the visitor enters a railroad cattle car of the type used by the Bulgarians to transport Jews from Monopol to Treblinka, the Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland.