News
New plaque in Auschwitz
Michel Azaria, vice-chairman of JEAA (the Judeo-Spanish at Auschwitz Association), visited the Museum. The JEAA has been engaged for some time in efforts to place a new plaque in the traditionnal language of Sephardic Jews at the Monument to the Victims of Auschwitz Concentration Camp.
There are already nineteen plaques at the Monument in the languages spoken by the victims, as well as a plaque in English. The Nazis deported 55,000 Sephardic Jews, including almost the entire Jewish community of Salonika, from Greece to Auschwitz.
Some 160,000 people speak this traditional language of Sephardic Jews today. The Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 conitnued to speak fifteenth-century Spanish in their new places of residence, most of which were in the Mediterranean littoral. Today it is regarded as an "endangered" language.
