Sephardic Communities and the Holocaust

What can a wedding photo tell us about the struggle to survive of the centuries-old Sephardic culture? Or a private letter, about the ordeal faced by one Sephardic community at a turning point in history? Or a simple dress, about a Sephardic mother’s will for rebirth?

These artifacts and others like them—the personal belongings of victims and survivors—help us understand the events of the Holocaust and the ongoing relevance of this history today.

Selections From Our Collection of Sephardic Artifacts

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Popular Orchestras
Popular orchestras featuring the mandolin, like this one in Rhodes, were prevalent throughout the Balkans during the early twentieth century. This photo was obtained from Miru Alcana, the sole survivor of an extended family of 57 members that had lived for generations on this island in the Aegean Sea. Photograph taken before 1939. —United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Miru Alcana
Wedding Portrait
In 1943, Victoria Sarfati and Yehuda Beraha hastily arranged their wedding in German-occupied Salonika to enable them to stay together during the uncertain times that lay ahead. A short time after this photo was taken, the newlyweds were deported to their death in Auschwitz. Their wedding picture was preserved by Yehuda’s brother and sister, Jaco and Miriam Beraha, who gave a copy of this and other family photos to the Museum in the late 1990s. Jaco, Miriam, and her husband Samuel Rouben escaped from the Salonika ghetto in late February 1943, three weeks before the start of the deportation actions. They found refuge at the local Italian consulate. Sympathetic consular officials provided them with Italian papers and train tickets to Italian-controlled Athens, where they were sheltered by members of the Greek Orthodox underground for the duration of the war. —United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Mary Beraha Rouben
Roundups
On March 11, 1943, within a few days of the departure of the first deportation trains from Salonika, the 3,276 Sephardi Jews of the Macedonian city of Bitola (Monastir) were rounded up by Bulgarian occupation authorities. They were imprisoned at a tobacco factory warehouse in nearby Skopje, along with almost 3,800 other Macedonian Jews. Three weeks later, all but a few had been deported to their death in Treblinka. One of those deported to Treblinka was Solomon Nehama of Bitola. His photograph was recently discovered in the Museum’s Photo Archives Branch by his nephew, Dr. Isaac Nehama, a survivor from Athens now living in Bethesda, Maryland. Hoping to help other descendants of Bitola Jews identify their relatives, Nehama volunteered his services to the Photo Archives and took on a year-long project to transcribe, translate, and cross-reference a collection of more than 1,400 ghetto portraits of Bitola Jews copied by the Museum from the State Archives of Macedonia.—United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of State Archives of Macedonia
Dora and Sarina Levy
Dora Levy and her mother Sarina thought their ordeal was over when they were liberated by the British army in October 1944. Most of their immediate family had survived in hiding. They themselves had fled from the Salonika ghetto to Italian-controlled Athens in the spring of 1943 and managed to survive in hiding for a year and a half with little food or clothing. But the liberation brought little improvement in their economic situation, and the outbreak of the Greek Civil War shortly afterward prolonged the period of privation. Since new clothing was beyond their means, Sarina and Dora used flour sacks from a nearby warehouse for fabric. Sarina washed the sacks and colored them with a red dye. Afterwards, Dora, who had supported herself in hiding as a dressmaker’s apprentice, cut the sacks and fashioned a dress for herself. She then embroidered the pockets to give it a more festive look. For several years Dora wore this dress as her special Sabbath garb. In February 2003 Dora Levy (now Saltiel) donated this dress to the Museum along with a cache of personal papers and photographs documenting the experience of her once large, extended family from Salonika. See more of Dora Levy's family photographs

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Jews of the Spanish Homeland

Transcript

This 1929 documentary film titled “Jews of the Spanish Homeland” contains close-ups of the leading Balkan Sephardi rabbis of the time and rare footage of Jewish schools, residential quarters, synagogues, and cemeteries as well as a sampling of Sephardi religious customs. It was discovered by Sharon Pucker Rivo, director of the National Center for Jewish Film (Waltham, Massachusetts), during a visit to Barcelona to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain. —National Center for Jewish Film, at Brandeis University

A Race Against Time

Right now the Museum is in a race against time to collect and preserve original artifacts from Sephardic Jews (or their descendants) who suffered displacement, persecution, or discrimination under the rule of Nazi Germany and its Axis partners between 1938 and 1945. This includes materials relating to life in the immediate postwar era and emigration. We are also seeking artifacts and testimony from other eyewitnesses to these events.

Contact Us

If you have artifacts you would like to donate or want to discuss this collecting effort with a Museum curator, please e-mail curator@ushmm.org or call 202.488.2649.

Selections From Our Collection of Sephardic Artifacts

Jews of the Spanish Homeland

A Race Against Time

Contact Us

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