Lithuania

The Jewish community of Lithuania numbers only some 6000. People It is no more than a shadow of what it once was: until the Shoah, it was a center of the Yiddish-speaking lands. In a sense, everything began here from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when European Judaism's center of gravity shifted from Germany and France to Poland and Belarus. As a reaction to the pietisitic practices ...

Bosnia-Herzegovina

In Sarajevo, where most of Bosnia's Jews lived, the earliest refugees from the Iberian Peninsula began arriving around 1565, having first stopped in Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, and other regions under the Turkish domination. Belonging to the rayah (the term used by the Turks to designate non-Muslim populations under their control), as such they had a status equivalent to that of other ...

Serbia 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, ...

Greece

Below the Acropolis is Athens, a marble plaque engraved with a menorah has been uncovered amid the clutter of the Agora, near a statue of Emperor Hadrien. Perhaps it used to rest on one of the ancient synagogues visited by Saint Paul, who had as little success with the Athenian Jews as the Greek philosophers had with the Areopagus.

Turkey

In the beautiful synagogue of Ahrida, one of the oldest in Istanbul, the tevah assumes the shape of a caravel symbolizing not only Noah's Ark but also the vessels that in 1492 transported the Jews banished from Spain to the shores of the Ottoman Empire. A royal edict issued in Granada, only recently recaptured from the Arabs, gave the Jews no choice but conversion to Catholicism or exile. ...

Bulgaria

In a medieval miniature, Bulgarian Czarina Sara figures beside her husband, Czar Alexander, a two children, Shishman and Tamara. A Jewish queen, Sara of Turvono was obliged to convert to Christianity, adopting the name Theodora. In the fourteenth century such a union shock no one in Constantinople, though it would have been inconceivable to the leaders of Rome.

Romania

There is little evidence of a Jewish presence on the coats of the Black Sea before the arrival of Roman legions in the early second century C.E. Vestiges, coins, and inscriptions preserved in a museum in Bucharest, however, attest to the existence of Jews in the region throughout the first millennium. Near the end of the thirteenth century, the great voyager Benjamin de Tudela had already ...

Czech Republic

Below the bell tower of Prague's Jewish city hall, there are two clock faces. One displays Roman numerals, and the other Hebrew letters. The hands of the first clock revolve in the normal clockwise direction while those of the second turn counterclockwise, following the customary manner of reading Hebrew right to left. Such clocks are rare, and this is the only one of its kind adorning a ...

Slovakia

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 ...

Hungary

At the Jewish Museum of Budapest, a replica of a tombstone dating from the third century bears the image of a menorah. This relic attests to nearly 1700 years of Jewish presence in the Carpathian basin, predating that of the Magyar tribes who broke free from the confines of the Ural Mountains during the ninth century. The modern history of Judaism in Hungary goes all the way back to ...

Croatia

Jewish settlers had to wait until the death of Austria's Catholic and very anti-Semitic Archduchess Maria Theresa and the ascension of her her tolerant son, Joseph II, to gain the right to establish communities in northern Croatia, which at the time had been Hapsburg territory for nearly three centuries.

Slovenia

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 ...

Spain

There are numerous legends surrounding the arrival of the Jews in Spain. They were propagated by Jewish and Christian chroniclers, especially in the sixteenth century. Some say they came in the time of King Solomon, following in the wake of the Phoenician sailors; others that the event was one consequence of their exile from Judaea, as ordered by Nebuchadrezzar.

Switzerland

Jewish craftsmen and merchants settled in Switzerland's Roman cities between the third and fourth centuries, but the first documents that mention them date only from the thirteenth century. Throughout the following two centuries, Jews were regularly accused of ritualistic crimes on Christian children and poisoning wells.

Karl Marx House

Brückenstraße 10, 54290 Trier +49 (0) 651 970680 https://www.fes.de/marx/index_gr.html

Heinrich Heine Institute

Bilker Str. 12-14, 40213 Düsseldorf +49 (0) 211 8992902 https://www.duesseldorf.de/heineinstitut/

Germany

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 ...

Jewish Museum of the Deportation and Resistance

Kazerne Dossin, 153 Goswin de Stassartstraat, 2800 Malines 01132 (0) 15 29 06 60 https://www.kazernedossin.eu

Jewish Museum of Belgium

21, rue des Minimes, 1000 Bruxelles 01132 (0) 2 512 19 63 Page d’accueil

Sephardic Synagogue

154, rue Roosendael, 1090 Brussels http://www.cisu.be/

Belgium

The history of the Belgian Jews is similar to that of the Jews of western Europe generally, involving migrations and internal changes as the old communities came under the influence of other traditions.

The Jews came to what is now Belgium in the thirteenth century, settling at Arlon (Aarlen), Brussels, Hasselt, Jodoigne (Geldenaken), Zootleeuw (Leau), Leuven (Louvain), Mechelen (Malines), ...

Anne Frank House

Prinsengracht 263-267, 1016 GV Amsterdam +01131 (0) 20 556 7105 http://www.annefrank.org/fr/

Portuguese Synagogue

Mr. Visserplein 3, 1011 RD Amsterdam +31 (0) 20 5 310 380 http://www.portugesesynagoge.nl/

Verzetsmuseum

Plantage Kerklaan 61A, 1018 CX Amsterdam +01131 (0) 20 620 2535 https://www.verzetsmuseum.org

Rijksmuseum

Museumstraat 1, 1071 XX Amsterdam +01131 (0) 900 0745 https://www.rijksmuseum.nl

Rembrandt House Museum

Jodenbreestraat 4, 1011 NK Amsterdam +01131 (0) 20 520 0400 http://www.rembrandthuis.nl/

Joods Historisch Museum

Nieuwe Amstelstraat 1, 1011 PL Amsterdam +01131 (0) 20 531 0310 http://www.jhm.nl/

The Netherlands

Holland has always welcomed political and religious refugees. The first great wave of Jews immigrated to the Netherlands from Spain and Portugal at the end of the sixteenth century. Although nominally present since the twelfth century, the Jews in Holland were able to openly practise their religion for the first time beginning in this later period. The Sephardic Jews were the first to make a ...

James Joyce Centre

35 N Great George’s St, Dublin 1 +353 (0) 1 878 8547 http://jamesjoyce.ie/

Irish Jewish Museum

3 Walworth Rd, Dublin 8 +353 (0) 85 706 7357 http://www.jewishireland.org/