Jews established in Norway around 1851 when a law prohibiting their entry was revoked. The Jewish Community became organized at the end of the century. In 1920, two synagogues were opened. In 1930, the Community only numbered 852 persons. During the Holocaust, half of the Jews escaped, mostly to Sweden. The rest were deported and murdered. Oslo’s Jewish community centers around the , ...
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Norway
Visitors walking on the street named after Norway's national poet Henrik Wergeland (1808-45) will be reminded that it was Wergeland who was behind the law that allowed Jews to immigrate to this country. Most of Norway's Jews live in Oslo (950 people), with about 100 living in Trondheim. The Norwegian community can pride itself on having given Israel a minister: the great rabbi Michael Melchior, who
Plus d'infosKiev
From the outset, the history of Kiev has been tied to that of its Jewish community. One of the earliest references to the city is in a tenth-century document discovered in the genizah in a Cairo synagogue: a letter sent to Kiev by Jacob bar Hanuker. A synagogue in Kiev proper is mentioned in a document dating to 1113. A zhydovskie vorota (Jewish gate) is mentioned in a text from 1146, near ...
Plus d'infosUkraine
Ukraine, the largest of the former Soviet Republics, is, along with Belarus and Lithuania, heir to the former "Pale of Settlement", the buffer zone designed t contain the Jews within the westernmost margins of the Russian Empire. Despite considerable losses due to the Shoah and resulting emigration, Ukraine still contains a large Jewish community (around 500000 members, or 1% of the ...
Plus d'infosMinsk
Minsk, the capital of Belarus, first welcomed Jews in the fifteenth century. They settled here to engage in the trade between Poland and Russia. After Poland was divided, the Jewish community began to grow: it consisted of 47560 members at the time of the 1897 census, or 52% of the population. The Germans arrived in Minsk on 28 June 1941, only six days after launching their offensive, and the ...
Plus d'infosSubotica
Subotica’s synagogue, built in 1903, was converted into a theater after the war. The building was renovated in 2005. It is located in the city center a few steps from city hall. In the Jewish cemetery, a monument commemorates the victims of the Shoah.
Plus d'infosNovi Sad
The Jewish community of Voivodina’s capital was, until World War II, one of the most prosperous in all Yugoslavia. Present since the city was founded in the late seventeenth century and 4000 members strong before its extermination, the community was keen on building structures to rival those of other ethnic groups in this majority-Hungarian Catholic city (it belonged to the ...
Plus d'infosNis
A monument dedicated to the victims of the Shoah has been put up on Bubanj Hill. The former synagogue today serves as an art gallery and the Jewish cemetery was rehabilitated in 2004.
Plus d'infosBelgrade
After the conquest of Belgrade by the Turks in 1521, Sephardic Jews quickly supplanted in number the Ashkenazic community that had arrived before them, from Hungary in particular. Loyal Turkish subjects, Belgrade’s Jews enjoyed an initial phase of relative prosperity, transforming the city into one of the premier Sephardic centers in the Balkans. The Belgrade yeshiva was known ...
Plus d'infosCrete
The Jews have a unique and turbulent history on Crete, one of the most important islands in the Mediterranean. Under the Byzantine Empire, Cretan Jews believed the hour of the final redemption had rung: in 430 C.E., a false messiah, the rabbi Moses, promised to lead them all to Jerusalem; they then threw themselves en masse into the raging sea and drowned. Several centuries later, the hand of ...
Plus d'infosBardejov
Bardejov possessed a large Jewish quarter where some 5000 Jews lived before World War II. This small medieval city of 35000 inhabitants lies thirty-seven miles north of Presov near the Polish border. Most of Bardejov’s Jewish community was wiped out during the war. Despite the devastations of the war and postwar reconstruction, a few houses and an interesting eighteenth-century ...
Plus d'infosPresov
Not far from Kosice, Presov was also an important center of Jewish life. More than 6000 Jews from the city and surrounding villages were killed during the war. Today fewer than 100 Jews live here in Presov. The area from near the old city center with its Renaissance homes and palace to beyond the city walls once marked the extent of the Jewish quarter. Close to the Jewish community center ...
Plus d'infosKosice
The capital of eastern Slovakia, Kosice is a large industrial city of 250000 inhabitants. Its sizable Jewish community was almost totally annihilated during the Second World War. The city os now home to 800 Jews. The spacious nineteenth-century synagogue is in a building adjacent to the community headquarters. The building also includes a mikvah, a kosher butcher shop, and a prayer hall. This ...
Plus d'infosTrencin
Trencin is a city of roughly 60000 inhabitants, and you will find on Vajanskeho Street a beautiful synagogue dating from the beginning of the twentieth century. Although now an exhibition space, its decorations remain, and a plaque recalls that the building was once the location of worship for the 1300 Jews in the city, most of whom were exterminated during World War II.
Plus d'infosBratislava
Bratislava, capital of Slovakia and a large city of more than 500000 inhabitants, is located on the banks of the Danube River not far from the Hungarian and Austrian borders. Although Jews have thought to live lived here since the Roman period, the first mention of a community dates back to the second half of the thirteenth century. The Jews of Bratislava have been expelled from the city ...
Plus d'infosCarpathian Foothills
This region of rolling hills punctuated by vineyards merits a two-day visit for memory’s sake. There remains, in fact, little evidence of Jewish life here, as most of it was eradicated by the Shoah.
Plus d'infosNova Gorica
Nova Gorica was divided between Italy and Slovenia after the Second World War. It is on the Italian (Gorizia) side that one should look for major evidence of a past Jewish presence. In the Slovenian section, however, there is a Jewish cemetery dating back to the fourteen century. With one and a quarter acres of surface area, it contains nearly 900 gravestones, the oldest of which date to the ...
Plus d'infosLendava
The Lendava city council is working to renovate to old synagogue, built in 1866, and turn it into a cultural center featuring a permanent exhibition on local Jewish history. Seriously damaged by the Germans during the war, the synagogue was later sold to the city by the Federation of Yougoslav Jewish Communities, which then used it as a warehouse. The former Jewish school, active until the ...
Plus d'infosMurska Sobota
The Jewish cemetery of Murska Sobota no longer exists; it was demolished in the 1990s. The site features, however, a small monument erected in memory of the city’s Jews murdered during the war.
Plus d'infosMaribor
The Jewish settlement in the medieval fortress of Maribor, near the Austrian border, dates back at least to the thirteenth century. This Jewish community must have been rather prosperous, for in the fifteen century several Catholic families asked to convert to Judaism, a rare event certainly in Europe at the time. After their expulsion by Austrian emperor Maximilian I, Maribor’s Jews ...
Plus d'infosLjubljana
The only remaining traces of a prior Jewish presence in Ljubljana are the names of two narrow streets in the city center, Street of the Jews (Zidovska ulica) and Passage of the Jews (Zidovska steza), the place of the medieval ghetto until the 1515 expulsion. The remains of a neighborhood of about thirty houses have apparently been found beneath the Baroque buildings here, constructed in the ...
Plus d'infosSerbia and Montenegro (ex-Yugoslavia)
Serbia and Voivodina form, along with Montenegro, a nation that had been called The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia until 4 February 2003, when it was renamed Serbia and Montenegro. The Serbian and Voivodinan regions witnessed one of the first implementations of the Final Solution, its Jewish population as brutally martyred by German troops as were Jews in Poland or the Soviet Union. In fact, ...
Plus d'infosSlovakia
The history of Jews in Slovakia -dating from the sixteenth century under the protection of the Hapsburg- intersects that of their fellow believers in Hungary and the Czech Republic. Jews in these three countries experienced the same vicissitudes of discrimination, expulsions, and, in the seventeenth century, the acquisition of some civil rights. Numerous Jews from neighboring Moravia flocked ...
Plus d'infosSlovenia
A Slavic land under Germanic rule for many centuries, Slovenia finally gained independence in 1991. The fate of the Jewish population here depended largely over the years on the good will of its princes. Nonetheless, the Jewish presence in the region goes back to antiquity. Archaeological digs have revealed a tomb engraved with a menorah at the Skocjan site, which likely dates back to the ...
Plus d'infosGermany
At the end of the nineteenth century, an international conference took place sponsored by the Zionist Organisation that was dedicated to the problem of the future national language of the Jewish state. A heated debate was held and the question put to vote: Hebrew won out only by several votes over German to become the national language. As absurd as it might seem, the language of Goethe ...
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