Les Juifs de Belgrade

Belgrade, under Ottoman domination, was home to a Sephardic community established after the Iberian expulsion, speaking Judeo-Spanish and organized around its lower-city neighborhood (Dorćol). In the nineteenth century, after Serbian autonomy and then independence, Ashkenazim from Central Europe joined them, and the Jews gradually obtained civic equality. The community, mercantile and artisanal, had both Sephardic and Ashkenazi synagogues as well as communal institutions. After the German occupation of April 1941, the Jews of Belgrade were among the first in Europe subjected to systematic massacres, perpetrated by the Wehrmacht and the SS with the assistance of local collaborators, and virtually all were exterminated between 1941 and 1942. A small community reconstituted itself after the war.

Sources & resources

• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan
• Jewish Virtual Library ↗