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International Conference Jews in the Balkans: History, Religion, Culture May 8 – 10, 2017

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International Conference Jews in the Balkans: History, Religion, Culture May 8 – 10, 2017 International Conference Jews in the Balkans: History, Religion, Culture May 8 – 10, 2017 University of Split Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Martina Bitunjac, Ph.D. Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies, Potsdam Jewish artists during the Shoah – between exile and resistance This paper explores different kinds of Jewish creative artists on the territory of the former Yugoslavia who had to fight for their lives after the dissolution of the state in April 1941. Several sought refuge in the Yugoslav resistance movement and attempted to continue working at their art within the movement. Others went into hiding, or, in the worst case scenario, were murdered by Nazi or local fascists. The paper hopes to introduce those more or less unknown artists whose works were deemed “degenerate” in Nazi Germany and who fled to Yugoslavia as they, too, were being threatened with deportation for having a Jewish spouse, for example. Most of all, the paper attempts to illustrate the extent to which this “lost generation” of artists were able to pursue their art and their passion in the region, and which new significance art in the time of persecution took on for them. Martina Bitunjac holds a Ph.D. in modern history and in the history of Europe from the Humboldt University of Berlin and the Sapienza University of Rome. She is currently working as a research associate and is the managing editor of the Journal of Religious and Cultural Studies/Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies. She is also a docent at the University of Potsdam. Her academic interests include gender studies, Jewish history, as well as the history of Southeast Europe. Marijan Buljan, Ph.D. candidate University of Split The Split Jewish community with emphasis on the activities of the Emigration Committee The Jewish community records kept in the National Archives in Split comprise a small collection consisting of eight books and four boxes. Nevertheless, it provides an interesting insight into the life of the Jewish community before and during World War II. The records also include certain administrative documents related to the interwar period, such as the book of revenues and expenditures of Split’s Jewish community and a list of Jews living in Split in the period of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. On the other hand, the importance of the records lies in the documents related to the activities of the Emigration Committee during World War II. After the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, the Treaty of Rome was signed and Split was annexed by Italy, which was met with dissatisfaction among the people of Split. The Emigration Committee was established with the aim of helping Jewish refugees. They wanted to help the Jews who were in Split (providing them with food and other material means), the Jews who wanted to emigrate to another country, and the Jews who wanted to find missing members of their families. The president of the committee was Viktor Morpurgo, a descendant of a highly regarded Split Jewish family. Emigration Committee correspondence includes a number of letters between the committee and the Italian organization DELASEM, which was established to aid Jews. The overall difficult situation and the emerging financial problems provoked disagreements within the committee itself. Following the Italian capitulation to the Allies in September 1943, the Ustaše, with the help of the Germans, took control of Split, which then became a part of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH). The Emigration Committee ceased its activities, and the majority of Jews were deported, Viktor Morpurgo among them. This paper aims to present the records of the Jewish community, with special attention being given to the work of the Emigration Committee. Marijan Buljan was born in Split in 1986. In 2011, he graduated from the University of Split in the departments of history and Croatian language and literature. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Split in the Faculty of Philosophy. His fields of interest are European political history in the first part of the 20th century, the history of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the history of the Dalmatian region. Philip Carabott, Ph.D. King’s College London Greek Jewry in dire straits Like most of their coreligionists in liberated Europe, in the wake of the Shoah, Greek Jews found themselves in dire straits. Of the approximately 7,700 survivors in early 1945, 85% were “completely lacking any kind of means to live on”, 10% needed partial assistance and only 5% were financially independent. A year on, the battle for the new survival of some 10,000 returnees had been won, though not the war itself. Whether emerging from hiding, from participation in the resistance movement or returning from the concentration and death camps, they had to rebuild their lives in an environment where choices, and responses thereof, were determined by exogenous factors – e.g., the usurpation of property, the rise of anti-Semitism and the on-going Greek Civil War. In equal measure, they were shaped by the powerful allure of Zionism and immigration to Eretz Yisrael, and the survivors’ different experiences of the war years, which admittedly had dented the communal idea (and ideal) of “material sacrifice for all” and rendered obsolete the motto “all for one and one for all”. The paper seeks to map out the quantitative and main qualitative features of the historical subject in question, to outline the multiple difficulties it faced, to unravel the dilemmas confronting it, and to trace its varied responses to being Jewish in early post-Shoah Greece. Philip Carabott is a research associate at King’s College London, where he taught modern and contemporary Greek history from 1990 to 2011. He has published on politics, society and minorities in Greece of the modern era. He is a founding member of the Workshop on the Study of Modern Greek Jewry (https://greekjewry.wordpress.com/). With Maria Vassilikou, he is working on a project entitled “A concise history of the Shoah in Greece”, which is financially supported by the German Foreign Ministry’s German-Greek Future Fund. Dragan Cvetković, Ph.D. Museum of Genocide Victims, Belgrade The Jewish component of the Yugoslav partisan movement – geostatistical analysis of losses The Jewish community was the most disadvantaged of all ethnic groups in Yugoslavia since the early days of the war. Doomed to total destruction in most of the territory formed after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the Jewish community had been exposed to different models of repression and terror. Their pre-war high concentration in a relatively small number of urban centers contributed to the increasing exposure to repression and terror, and facilitated the implementation of the Holocaust, which expedited their destruction of the first years of the war. Fast and organized enforcement of the Holocaust prevented a better organization in providing resistance, but resistance did still exist. Recognizing the Yugoslav partisan movement as an organization capable of resisting the occupation -- the fragmentation of the country, with the proclaimed national equality in the future state of social equality -- and as the only organization capable of providing real protection in the circumstances, members of the Jewish community had been joining the movement since its formation, thereby preserving their physical existence and chances for survival. The Jewish community’s share of losses in the partisan movement will be displayed based on the partly revised list of “Victims of the War 1941 – 1945” drawn up in 1964, which contains information on about 55,000 Jews who were killed. Personal data include the names of the victims, place of birth and residence before the war, age, profession, and other data, allowing the numbers to be integrated and showing the internal structure of losses suffered. The paper will show their comparative territorial distribution within the partisan movement, age, professional structure, place and manner of suffering. It will also establish the relationship of the losses between civilians and partisans from the Jewish community, as well as with the losses of other ethnic groups represented in the Yugoslav partisan movement depending on the territory or region from which they originated, according to their share in the population of those territories. Although small in the number of victims and participation in total losses of partisans in Yugoslavia (0.18%), the losses Jews suffered in their movement have a great symbolic significance because they show the desire of the people to stand up and fight, to resist and survive extermination, and to win the war against fascism as the greatest evil of the twentieth century. Dragan Cvetković graduated in history at the University of Belgrade in 1995 and received a doctoral degree from the same university in 2016. In Belgrade’s Museum of Genocide Victims he heads the project Revision of the Register of War Casualties 1941 – 1945, (originally written in 1964). His main topics of interest are war victims in Yugoslavia 1941 – 1945, genocide and the Holocaust. He is a coauthor with Dr. Igor Graovac (of Croatia’s Institute of History in Zagreb) of the book Human losses in Croatia between 1941 and 1945, Questions, Examples and Results, Zagreb 2005, and over twenty of articles related to war casualties. He has participated in Yad Vashem’s “Recording the names” workshop three times and in “Academic exchange with Serbian scholars” in Yad Vashem in 2006. Kotel DaDon, Ph.D. University of Zagreb Religious life during the Holocaust – a spiritual resistance In this lecture the speaker will explore the existence of a Jewish spiritual resistance during the Holocaust. The great evil of the Holocaust caused and continues to evoke a crisis of faith among many Jews and non-Jews who believe in the traditional idea of a God: the idea that God is both omnipotent and good.
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