Skopje, Macedonia – Macedonia Remembers Tiny Jewish Community

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    A woman stands in front of a memorial for 7,144 Macedonian Jews, in the tobacco warehouses in Skopje, Macedonia, on Monday, March 11, 2013. Macedonia commemorates 70-years of the holocaust of its Jewish community, almost completely wiped out during the Nazis’ occupation of this tiny Balkan country during World War II. (AP Photo/Boris Grdanoski)Skopje, Macedonia – Macedonia on Monday marked the 70th anniversary of the deportation of nearly its entire Jewish community to a Nazi death camp during World War II, while a U.S.-based diaspora group called on neighbor Bulgaria to apologize for its role in the Holocaust.

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    Culture Minister Elizabeta Milevska led the memorial to honor the 7,144 people who were deported. Only about 50 of them survived.

    Macedonia was part of Yugoslavia until its independence in 1991, and most of its territory was occupied during the war by Bulgaria.

    The Washington D.C.-based group Macedonian United Diaspora on Monday called on Bulgaria to make a public apology for the country’s role in the murder of Macedonian Jews, who were sent by train to the Treblinka concentration camp in occupied Poland.

    There was no immediate reaction from officials in Bulgaria. But the country’s parliament acknowledged Friday that 11,343 Jews had been deported to Nazi concentration camps from areas under Bulgarian wartime control — in Greece and Yugoslavia.


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    5 Comments
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    wsbrgh
    wsbrgh
    11 years ago

    Alexander the Great during the time of Shimon HaTzadik was from Macedonia. We know him as Alexander Mukdan : “The Macedonian”.

    Buchwalter
    Buchwalter
    11 years ago

    Skopje one of the oldest Jewish communities Europe was decimated and and ravished during WWII by the Catholic Ustashi and the Moslem Bosnian SS organized by the Mufti Haj Ami el Husseini

    frumflorida
    frumflorida
    11 years ago

    My family is from what is now called Macedonia. Fortunately, my family left after WWI. Crazy.

    11 years ago

    some of us came to early, and some of us to late.