News
Trees Cry for Rain...
A new memorial tablet will be unveiled at the monument to the victims of the camp at the Birkenau site at 4:00 p.m. on Monday, March 24, 2003, the anniversary of the first transport sent by the Nazis from Salonika to Auschwitz.
A transport carrying 2,400 Jews from Salonika arrived in Auschwitz Concentration Camp on March 24, 1943. Only 584 men and 230 women were sent to the camp. The rest—almost 2,000 people—were murdered in the gas chambers. The Nazis deported a total of 55,000 Sephardic Jews, including almost the entire community of Salonika, from Greece to Auschwitz. The Sephardic communities of Holland, Belgium, France, and Italy were also sent to the death camps as part of the "final solution of the Jewish question."
The ceremonies are expected to include addresses by a representative of the Salonika Jewish community and by the former Auschwitz Concentration Camp prisoner Simone Veil. Invited guests include representatives of local government, the consuls of the USA and France, and the French historian Serge Klarsfeld, who is known for bringing about the arrest in the 1980s of "the butcher of Lyon," Klaus Barbie.
Rabbi Daniel Farhi, a Sephardic Jew of Turkish origins, will recite the Kaddish and Flory Jagoda will sing the traditional Sephardic song "arvoles yoran por luvias" ("trees cry for rain") a capella.
The costs associated with making and installing the new plaque and moving the English-language one are being borne by the Judeo-Espagnol A Auschwitz Association, (Paris, France) which has been working for a long time to commemorate the Sephardic Jews murdered in Auschwitz with a plaque in Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), their mother tongue.
It will feature a text identical to those, in other languages used by Auschwitz Concentration Camp victims, on the other twenty tablets:
For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity
Where the Nazis Murdered about one and a half million
men, women and children, mainly Jews
from various countries of Europe.
Auschwitz-Birkenau 1940-1945
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GLOSSARY
Simone Veil – deported from France to Auschwitz Concentration Camp as a Jew at the age of 17 in 1944. She lost her mother in the camp. Former minister for social welfare. First speaker of the European parliament, 1979-1982.
Flory Jagoda, known as "the flame of Sephardic music," was born in a Sephardic Jewish community in the Bosnian mountain village of Vlasenica, near Sarajevo. She was interned on the island of Korczuli during the Second World War and escaped along with her family. She has lived in the USA since 1947. She is a well-known singer with a repertoire of both the traditional songs of the Sephardic Jews and her own compositions in Ladino.
Sephardic - a Hebrew term with Biblical origins. It means originating from the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal). After the expulsions of the Jews from Spain and Portugal, Sephardic communities were established mainly in Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, Italy and Holland.
Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) – the traditional language of the Sephardic Jews who continued to speak fifteenth century Spanish in their new settlements, mostly in the Mediterranean basin, after being expelled from Spain in 1492. Approximately 160,000 people speak Judeo-Spanish. Today, the language is now regarded as "endangered."
Kaddish (Hebrew for "holy") in Judaism, a prayer that is a part of all collective Jewish prayers, and is also said by men for a full year after the death of a member of the immediate family, and on each anniversary of such a death.
[from Słownik wyrazów obcych i zrotów obcojęzycznych (Dictionary of Foreign Terms and Expressions) by Władysław Kopaliński]
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PROFESSOR ARON RODRIGUE
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
CALIFORNIA, USA
Holocaust - Sephardi losses
The Holocaust dealt a death blow to the majority of the Judeo-Spanish speaking Sephardi communities in Southeastern Europe. About 49,000 Jews, almost the entire Jewish population of Salonika was deported by the Nazis in 1943, the majority of whom were gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz. The smaller communities of Greece followed the same fate, with a total of 62,773 of 80,000 Sephardi Jews in Greece deported.
Most of Belgrade and Sarajevo Jews who were Sephardim were killed in local camps. 62,242 Jews from Yugoslavia out of a pre-war population of about 82,000 perished, one third of whom were Sephardim.
In areas newly occupied by Bulgaria in Macedonia and much of western Thrace, the Jewish communities were deported by the Bulgarians who handed them over to the Germans. The Bitola (Monastir) and Skopje (Uskub) communities of Yugoslavia met this end. About 12,000 Jews living in these Bulgarian controlled areas were exterminated. While deporting Jews to the provinces and confiscating much of their property, Bulgaria which was an ally of Germany did not hand over the Jews of old Bulgaria who survived the war and left for Israel en masse after 1948.
The old Judeo-Spanish heartland of the Balkans which had been established with the arrival of exiles from the Iberian Peninsula after 1492 disappeared in the Holocaust. Over 15,000 Sephardim who had left this area previously and emigrated to France and Belgium also fell victims to the Nazis.
