Good History of the Macedonian Jews

Macedonia’s Jewish Community Commemorates the Holocaust, and Embraces the Future:
3/14/2007 (Balkanalysis.com)

Story and photos by Christopher Deliso

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.

Two Millennia of Jewish History in Macedonia

The Jewish presence in Macedonia is a very ancient one. At the archaeological site of Stobi, an ancient Roman city in central Macedonia, traces of a synagogue dating back to the first century B.C. have been discovered. The Jewish community of Macedonia, therefore, ranks among Europe’s oldest. Trade, commerce and travel within the Roman Empire would have brought together peoples from all over the empire, and it appears that the Jews who came then remained intact during the waves of Slavic migration in the 6th and 7th centuries, when the Western empire was moribund, as ref"