Macedonia's Jewish Community Commemorates the HolocausT NEWS.BG
Wednesday, March 14
Macedonia’s Jewish Community Commemorates the Holocaust
Updated on: 14.03.2007, 14:33
Published on: 14.03.2007, 14:27
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Author: NEWS.BG, image: haze over Skopje
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SKOPJE (News.bg) — On Sunday, March 11, Macedonia’s small Jewish community held its annual Holocaust commemoration in Skopje, in honor of the approximately 7,200 Macedonian Jews who lost their lives after being deported to Treblinka by the Fascist Bulgarian occupying forces.
In little over a week in 1943, some 98 percent of the country’s total Jewish population thus disappeared forever, and with them a unique, centuries-old culture.
Sunday’s three-part ceremony began inside the facilities of the modern-day Tutunski Kombinat tobacco factory, where the Jewish prisoners were gathered and held for several days before the deportations of March 1943.
Following commemorations there and the laying of wreaths, the entourage of diplomats, Jewish community members from Macedonia and other Balkan countries, journalists and friends of the community continued to the site of Skopje’s former Jewish quarter, on the River Vardar opposite from the city center, where a Holocaust Memorial Center is under construction.
Set to open next year, the Center will have a museum, traditional Jewish room with furnishings, cinema, place for musical and other performances and research center with computers. MORE.
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Below is a post to my blog. Anyone who has any information, In English about this, please contact me(davidedenden@gmail.com) See the blog for links. Quotes from Ben-Gurions memoirs would be helpful
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Dimitar Vlahov, David Ben-Gurion and the Jews of the Ottoman Empire
I read in “A long row of candles; memoirs and diaries, 1934-1954”, the journalistic memoirs of C. L. Sulzberger, that David Ben Gurion, the first president of Israel wanted to invite Israel Dimitar Vlahov, formerly leader of the leftist United VMRO and at the time, a Vice President of Tito’s Yugoslavia .
Apparently Vlahov, as a deputy in the Parliament of the Young Turks, often spoke out in defense of the rights of the Jews, when Jewish members of Parliament were “too cowed to speak” (Sulzberger’s words). Vlahov and Gjorche Petrov had meetings with Theodor Hertzl (and I assume Ben-Gurion) to discuss cooporation between Macedonians and Jews. I do not know if Dimitar ever visited Israel, but apparently, his son Gustav Vlahov wrote a book called “How I Saw Israel “. (How he got the name “Gustav”, I don’t know).