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HIGHLIGHTS
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Remnants and recollections
Highlighting the experience of Sephardi Jews during the Holocaust
What can an ordinary wedding photo tell you about the struggle to survive of a centuries-old culture? Or a private letter, about the ordeal faced by an entire community at a particular point in history? Or a simple dress, about the will for rebirth?
That is the challenge facing curators in the Collections Division of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum as they accumulate, document, and preserve the evidence of the Holocaust. Artists and filmmakers flock to the Museum to mine its ever-growing collection of documents, photographs, films, testimonies, and artifacts.
Increasing public interest in the fate of Jews of Spanish and Greek descent living in southeastern Europe has prompted the Collections Division to scout out new sources of material about these communities and reexamine older collections in order to identify those that bear witness to the experience of Sephardi Jews. The resulting growing body of physical evidence documents the unique conditions and experiences of Sephardi Jews in southern Europe before, during, and immediately after the Holocaust.
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Popular orchestras featuring the mandolin, like this one in Rhodes, were prevalent throughout the Balkans during the early twentieth century. This photo was obtained from Miru Alcana, the sole survivor of an extended family of 57 members that had lived for generations on this island in the Aegean Sea. Photograph taken before 1939.
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“Jews of the Spanish Homeland”
This 1929 documentary film titled “Jews of the Spanish Homeland” contains close-ups of the leading Balkan Sephardi rabbis of the time and rare footage of Jewish schools, residential quarters, synagogues, and cemeteries as well as a sampling of Sephardi religious customs. It was discovered by Sharon Pucker Rivo, director of the National Center for Jewish Film (Waltham, Massachusetts), during a visit to Barcelona to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain.
Source: National Center for Jewish Film, at Brandeis University
As part of its mission to make materials accessible, the Collections Division holds a copy of this film.
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![Isaac Nehama<br>
Describes his mother's traditional cooking<br>
[2003 interview]<br><br>
Born April 29, 1927, Athens, Greece<br>
A 2003 USHMM oral history interview with Dr. Isaac Nehama, a survivor from Athens, provides a delightful glimpse into the prewar household of a Sephardi Jewish family. His description of his mother's preparation for the Jewish holidays evokes the tastes and smells of her kitchen, as well as the warmth of their home. Isaac's parents both came from Bitola (Monastir), Macedonia, and brought their local (Monastirli) traditions with them to Athens. They also kept their strong ties to the Judeo-Spanish language of Ladino, which they passed along to their children while making every effort to educate them in French and Greek as well.](images/isaacnihama.jpg)
Isaac Nehama
Describes his mother's traditional cooking
[2003 interview]
Born April 29, 1927, Athens, Greece
A 2003 USHMM oral history interview with Dr. Isaac Nehama, a survivor from Athens, provides a delightful glimpse into the prewar household of a Sephardi Jewish family. His description of his mother's preparation for the Jewish holidays evokes the tastes and smells of her kitchen, as well as the warmth of their home. Isaac's parents both came from Bitola (Monastir), Macedonia, and brought their local (Monastirli) traditions with them to Athens. They also kept their strong ties to the Judeo-Spanish language of Ladino, which they passed along to their children while making every effort to educate them in French and Greek as well.
See more of Isaac Nehama's family photographs...
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Monastir Songs
Performed by Dr. Avram Sadikario, Skopje, 1993
Recorded by Susana Weich-Shahak
Lyrics translated from Ladino by Isaac Nehama
Source S.Weich-Shahak collection in the National Sound Archives at the National Jewish and University Library in Jerusalem
Three Ladino folksongs (Kantigas) that were sung in the Jewish community of Monastir before World War II. Two are simple love songs, while the third is a song of praise for the honest laborer.
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In 1943, Victoria Sarfati and Yehuda Beraha hastily arranged their wedding in German-occupied Salonika to enable them to stay together during the uncertain times that lay ahead. A short time after this photo was taken, the newlyweds were deported to their death in Auschwitz.
Their wedding picture was preserved by Yehuda’s brother and sister, Jaco and Miriam Beraha, who gave a copy of this and other family photos to the Museum in the late 1990s. Jaco, Miriam, and her husband Samuel Rouben escaped from the Salonika ghetto in late February 1943, three weeks before the start of the deportation actions. They found refuge at the local Italian consulate. Sympathetic consular officials provided them with Italian papers and train tickets to Italian-controlled Athens, where they were sheltered by members of the Greek Orthodox underground for the duration of the war.
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On March 11, 1943,
within a few days of the departure of the first deportation trains from Salonika, the 3,276 Sephardi Jews of the Macedonian city of Bitola (Monastir) were rounded up by Bulgarian occupation authorities. They were imprisoned at a tobacco factory warehouse in nearby Skopje, along with almost 3,800 other Macedonian Jews. Three weeks later, all but a few had been deported to their death in Treblinka.
One of those deported to Treblinka was Solomon Nehama of Bitola. His photograph was recently discovered in the Museum’s Photo Archives Branch by his nephew, Dr. Isaac Nehama, a survivor from Athens now living in Bethesda, Maryland. Hoping to help other descendants of Bitola Jews identify their relatives, Nehama volunteered his services to the Photo Archives and took on a year-long project to transcribe, translate, and cross-reference a collection of more than 1,400 ghetto portraits of Bitola Jews copied by the Museum from the State Archives of Macedonia.
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Thirteen-year-old Norbert Yasharoff from Sofia, Bulgaria, witnessed the deportation of his co-religionists from Bulgarian-occupied Macedonia in what he recently described at a 2003 Holocaust commemoration at the Magen David Sephardi synagogue in Rockville, Maryland, as “one of the most traumatic experiences of my life.” In his words:
“I went with my father and a group of other Jewish leaders, including doctors, to Sofia’s main railway station where we tried to ease the suffering of the Macedonian and Thracian Jews who had arrived there locked like cattle in box cars on their way to the death camps in Poland. What we saw there was beyond description: men, women and children crying and begging through the narrow crevices of the box car doors for help and, above all, for water. We had brought water, food and blankets, but the Bulgarian guards prevented us from delivering any of those supplies and ordered us to disperse.” — Norbert Yasharoff
Two months later, Yasharoff and his family were exiled from their home, along with the entire Jewish population of Sofia. He described the nerve-wracking weeks leading up to the expulsion in a letter written one month after his resettlement to the provincial town of Pleven. He wrote the letter to his older cousin (respectfully addressed as uncle) Narcisse Barouch, who was then living in a forced-labor brigade encampment elsewhere in Bulgaria.
“Having witnessed what I think is the most trying period in the history of Bulgarian Jews, I am still haunted by the terror of that night, the night of May 22-May 23. As darkness fell, the rumor of an impending roundup and forced transfer to Poland spread like bush fire among the Jews of Sofia. Resigned to all the other blows that fate had visited on them in recent months, these poor people were desperately clinging to one last hope – the hope to survive… In our own home, we spent the night in sleepless silence. Huddled in the living room, we were all thinking the same gloomy thoughts, but none of us expressed them… Suddenly, he [father] shook his head and burst out crying. With a quivering voice, he told Odette and me that the time may come when, in order to save us, mother and he could be forced to leave us in the care of others.” — Norbert Yasharoff
This letter, which is one of the very few eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust in Bulgaria, was long assumed by its writer to have been lost. But during a 1989 visit to cousin Narcisse’s widow in Tel Aviv, Yasharoff recovered the 1943 missive. In 1990 he donated it to the Museum along with a rich collection of personal papers. Since that time Yasharoff has served both as a consultant on Balkan Jewry to the Museum’s Permanent Exhibition design team and a volunteer translator in the Museum’s Archives Branch.
See more of Norbert Yasharoff's family photographs...
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Ladino Lullaby
Performed by Miriam Baruch, 1943
Recorded by Fidel Baruch
This 1943 wire recording of the traditional Ladino lullaby Durme, Durme was sung by Miriam Baruch, a Jewish grandmother living in Sofia, Bulgaria. The recording was made only weeks before she and the entire Jewish community were expelled to the provinces.
Miriam Baruch (ca. 1870-1951) never learned to read or write, but she could speak at least three languages: Ladino, Bulgarian, and Turkish. She is also described as having a remarkable memory and "a sweet singing voice." Her youngest son, Fidel, borrowed a wire recorder and recorded her singing some of their favorite Ladino songs in spring 1943. An excerpt from this recording was used in a 1970s propaganda film entitled Eshelonite (The Transports). This film was produced by the Ministry of Culture of the Bulgarian government to claim that the Communist Party was responsible for saving Bulgarian Jewry during World War II. Miriam’s youngest son, a committed communist and partisan during the war, remained in Bulgaria after the war. He prevailed upon his friend, film director Chaim Oliver, to include her recorded voice in the film.
See more photographs of the Baruch/Borouchoff family...
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Flory (Floritza) Jagoda
Describes anti-Jewish measures following the occupation of Zagreb.
[1995 interview]
Born 1923, Sarajevo, Yugoslavia
Flory was born into a Sephardic Jewish family. When Flory was a young girl, her mother moved to Zagreb with Flory's stepfather; Flory joined them after living with her grandmother for two years. In Zagreb, Flory took music lessons and learned how to play the accordion. Germany and its allies invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, partitioning the country and establishing a fascist regime under the Ustase (pro-German Croatian nationalists) in Croatia. The Ustasa regime soon imposed anti-Jewish regulations in Zagreb; Flory was no longer allowed to attend school, and Jews were forced to wear a badge identifying them as Jews. Flory's family fled Zagreb, finding refuge in Italian-occupied areas and later in the south of mainland Italy. The Allies invaded Italy in 1943. After the Italian cease-fire in September 1943, Flory got a job with American forces in Bari, in southeastern Italy. In June 1945, after the war, Flory married an American sergeant, Harry Jagoda. They settled in the United States.
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Dora Levy and her mother Sarina
thought their ordeal was over when they were liberated by the British army in October 1944. Most of their immediate family had survived in hiding. They themselves had fled from the Salonika ghetto to Italian-controlled Athens in the spring of 1943 and managed to survive in hiding for a year and a half with little food or clothing. But the liberation brought little improvement in their economic situation, and the outbreak of the Greek Civil War shortly afterward prolonged the period of privation.
Since new clothing was beyond their means, Sarina and Dora used flour sacks from a nearby warehouse for fabric. Sarina washed the sacks and colored them with a red dye. Afterwards, Dora, who had supported herself in hiding as a dressmaker’s apprentice, cut the sacks and fashioned a dress for herself. She then embroidered the pockets to give it a more festive look. For several years Dora wore this dress as her special Sabbath garb. In February 2003 Dora Levy (now Saltiel) donated this dress to the Museum along with a cache of personal papers and photographs documenting the experience of her once large, extended family from Salonika.
See more of Dora Levy's family photographs...
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