History of the Jews in North Macedonia
[citation needed] Today, following the Holocaust and emigration, especially to Israel, around 200 Jews remain in North Macedonia, mostly in the capital, Skopje and a few in Štip and Bitola.
[9] A leading Jewish scholar, Judah Leon ben Moses Mosconi, born in Ohrid in 1328, wrote commentaries stating that incorrect interpretations of scripture often resulted from neglect of grammar.
Jews in this area prospered in the fields of trade, banking, medicine, and law, with some even reaching positions of power.
[23] Mentes Kolomonos, Santo Aroesti, the Muson brothers and Avram Nisan are other known participants in the uprising who collected weapons and provided rebels with money.,[24][25] Jews from modern-day North Macedonia got their citizen rights after the region became a part of Kingdom of Serbia.
In March 1941, Bulgaria became an ally of the Axis Powers and[28] in April 1941 the Bulgarian army entered Vardar Macedonia, in an effort to recover the region, which it saw as a natural part of its own national homeland.
Holocaust Museum, "on October 4, 1941, the Bulgarians enforced an extraordinary measure that prohibited the Jews of Macedonia from engaging in any type of industry or commerce.
"[29] Over the course of 1942, they enacted increasingly harsh measures against the Jews under their control in Vardar Macedonia, as well as in occupied northern Greece.
"[29] The harsh measures culminated in 1943 with the deportation, upon orders from Germany, of "Macedonian Jews"[29] and Greek Jewry to the Bulgarian border on the river Danube.
[28][30][31] Jews from Skopje, Stip, and Bitola, approximately a total of 7,215, were kept in "crowded, filthy conditions in four warehouses at Monopol" for 11 days before being put on trains to Treblinka.
In Vardar Macedonia, Estreya Haim Ovadya, a Jewish woman from Bitola, was among the first women to join the partisan movement in 1941.
Shelters were organized, as well as connections to the partisan units, but unfortunately, few Jews believed that a program for their destruction was underway and chose to stay together in the ghettos instead.
[33] In contrast with the old Bulgarian territories, where widespread protests against the deportations took place, including petitions to the Sofia government, in Vardar Macedonia such organized movements were lacking.
[34] In the early morning of Thursday, March 11, 1943, Bulgarian police and army rounded up the entire Jewish population of Skopje, Bitola and Štip.
[27][35] Among 7,215 people who were detained in warehouses there were:[36] Further, the Jews were transported to the Bulgarian border with Romania on the river Danube, surrendering them to the Nazi German authorities and thus sending them to their deaths.
After World War II in Yugoslav Macedonia the total number of surviving Jews, according to Society of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia, was 419.
[38] A combination of circumstances determined little awareness in the decades after the war about the fate of the Macedonian Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
The official line was of avoiding delving into the crimes of World War II, as they were considered to be capable of potentially destabilizing the internal inter-ethnic Yugoslav relations.
Only in 1958, the historian Aleksandar Matkovski published The Tragedy of the Jews from Macedonia, in 1959 translated in English under the title The Destruction of Macedonian Jewry in 1943 in the yearbook of Yad Vashem, and enlarged in a brochure in 1962.
It describes in detail the political, diplomatic and legal preparation of the deportation by the Bulgarian authorities and their German allies, the personnel and the organization of the concentration camp in the "Monopol" Tobacco Factory in Skopje and the three train transports to Treblinka.
Four years later, in 1986, the editors Žamila Kolonomos and Vera Vesković-Vangeli published the collection of documents The Jews in Macedonia during the Second World War (1941-1945), translated in Macedonian.
[45] The 2010–2011 project "The Jews from Macedonia and the Holocaust" sought to expand the scope of research and the spectrum of interdisciplinary angles around this topic and it materialized in a chrestomathy of fourteen original works and archival documents and also in an exhibition.
"[49] The First Balkan Rabbinical Conference was also held there, organized by the Jewish Community in North Macedonia "Yeshiva Bet Midrash Sepharadi - Rabbi Shlomo Kassin, World Zionist Organization - Department for Religious Affairs in Diaspora - Jerusalem - Israel", led by Rabbi Yechiel Wasserman and by the Government of North Macedonia (a commission for relations with religious communities and groups).
The Conference was hosted, in part, by Gligor Tashkovich, Minister of Foreign Investment of the Republic of Macedonia and he also gave a luncheon address.
This project to train Rabbi Kozma, to serve in a community where the institution of rabbi didn't exist for 60 years, was supported by the Jewish community in North Macedonia, Yeshiva - Rabbinical College Bet Midrash Sepharadi in Jerusalem - Israel and the World Zionist Organization - Department for Religious Affairs in Diaspora - Jerusalem - Israel.
Major landmarks and tourist attractions, such as the Stone Bridge, Skopje Fortress and the Old Turkish Bazaar are located around the museum.
