History of the Jews in Monastir
The history of the Jews in Monastir (present-day Bitola, North Macedonia) and its region reaches back two thousand years.
The Monastir Province was an Ottoman vilayet, created in 1864, encompassing territories in present-day Albania, North Macedonia (one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, from which it declared independence in 1991) and Greece.
The Germans transported the Jewish population of Monastir and environs to their deaths in Treblinka as part of their plan to murder all European Jews.
This appeal to the West marked the beginning of the Sephardic community's reorientation toward European culture and the gradual introduction of secular education and values into the population.
These changes took place at the same time as new transportation links to Salonika expanded trade and brought economic prosperity to the Monastir Jewish community.
This period of cultural and economic development was cut short by political upheavals in the region, beginning in 1903 with the Macedonian rebellion against the Turkish rulers of the Ottoman Empire.
As a result, thousands of Jewish Monastirlis (as the locals referred to themselves) emigrated to North and South America, Jerusalem, and the Sephardic metropolis of Salonika.
However, the Jewish community continued to call the city by the name it bore during centuries of Ottoman rule: Monastir.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Monastir's Jewish population reached nearly 11,000, but by 1914 years of emigration had reduced the community to just over 6,000.
Bitola became part of the new state of Yugoslavia, and in the 1920s and 1930s Zionism emerged as the dominant force among the local Jewish youth.
Although Yugoslavia had reluctantly joined the Axis alliance with Germany, the Yugoslav government was toppled by an anti-German military coup on March 27, 1941.
Supported militarily by her Axis allies (Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania), Germany quickly subdued the Balkans.
Bulgaria annexed Yugoslav Macedonia (the area including the cities of Skopje and Bitola in southern Yugoslavia).
On October 4, 1941, the Bulgarians enforced an extraordinary measure that prohibited the Jews of Yugoslav Macedonia from engaging in any type of industry or commerce.
The Jews were told that they were being transferred to other parts of Bulgaria and that after the war they would be returned to their homes, but this did little to ease the terror and confusion of this massive eviction.
Advance rumors of this action convinced Kolonomos to hide, and that night she and four others sat in a windowless room in a shop and listened to what was happening to their community.
At around 7 a.m. the Jews were forced to walk to the railroad station, where a train was waiting to take them away to neighboring Skopje; a temporary detention center had been established at the state tobacco monopoly warehouse known as Monopol.
Stumbling over one another in the darkness, dragging our luggage and continuously being beaten by the Bulgarian soldiers, the children, the aged and infirm tried to squeeze into the building.
Under the pretext of searching us to find hidden money, gold, or foreign currency, they sadistically forced us to undress entirely...
Nico Pardo was one of the few who managed to escape from the Skopje detention center and after the war he described the Jews' despair in Monopol: We were in a terrible mood.
On the morning of March 22, 1943, some 2,300 Macedonian Jews from Monopol were forced to board a train consisting of 40 cattle cars.
On March 25, German and Bulgarian soldiers loaded about 2,400 Macedonian Jews onto a train made up of freight cars.
The departure of this train for the killing center at Treblinka signaled the final destruction of the Monastir Jewish community.
Though many of the Jewish inhabitants of eastern Europe were required to submit photographs for purposes of police registration, work permits, and ration cards both inside and outside ghettos established by Germany or its Axis allies, few of these photograph collections survived the war intact.
