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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
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Hanukkah After Bondi Beach: We Must Not Retreat
Police officers stand guard following the attack on a Jewish holiday celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone
The attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach took place at a public Hanukkah celebration — an openly Jewish gathering marking a holiday meant to symbolize continuity, restraint, and survival. Candles were lit. Families had gathered. Jewish life was visible and unhidden. Violence arrived anyway. That fact matters. This was not random disorder that happened to occur near Jews. It was an assault on Jews gathered publicly as Jews.
For Jewish communities around the world, the message was immediate and chilling: a basic assumption — that peaceful religious celebration in a public space is protected — no longer feels secure.
Bondi Beach was not an aberration. It was a signal that even the most ordinary expressions of Jewish life now take place against a backdrop of heightened risk and weakened moral confidence.
Since October 7, 2023, Jewish communities have been forced to absorb a series of shocks that, taken together, reveal something deeper than a temporary spike in antisemitic incidents.
Jews have watched crowds chant “death to Jews” in major Western cities. We have seen synagogues, schools, and community centers require armed security as a baseline condition of existence. We have watched public officials hesitate, equivocate, or retreat into procedural language when confronted with explicit calls for Jewish death.
In that context, even violence that is not explicitly ideological is experienced differently. Bondi Beach occurred in a world where rage, intimidation, and public disorder have been steadily normalized — and where antisemitism is too often treated as a contextualized grievance rather than a moral emergency. It is no coincidence that Hanukkah celebrations across Europe, North America, and Australia this year are being guarded as potential targets rather than assumed civic fixtures.
For Jews, these are not abstract concerns. They shape daily life in quiet but consequential ways. This Hanukkah, many Jews will decide whether to light publicly or privately, whether to post photos or remain discreet, whether to wear a kippah or tuck it into a pocket, whether to gather openly or behind security checkpoints.
These are not acts of panic. They are acts of realism — born of a recognition that the social consensus protecting Jewish life is weaker than it once was. I have felt this calculation myself, not as fear but as prudence — an awareness that Jewish visibility now requires forethought in ways it did not a decade ago.
Hanukkah is often softened into a generic story about “light in dark times.” But that framing misses its harder truth.
Hanukkah commemorates a moment when Jews confronted a society that had lost its sense of limits — when desecration was tolerated, when power displaced law, and when public authority proved unwilling or unable to defend moral boundaries. The Maccabees did not revolt because they rejected pluralism. They revolted because pluralism had collapsed into coercion.
That distinction matters now.
Across Western democracies, restraint is increasingly treated with suspicion. Rampage violence is explained as inevitable. Public disorder is described as expressive. Antisemitic chants are reframed as political speech. Leaders and institutions speak fluently about process and context, but struggle to say plainly that some acts are beyond the pale.
The result is a dangerous permission structure. Not a conspiracy. Not a single ideology. But a cultural habit of hedging when clarity is required — of explaining rather than condemning, of balancing rather than drawing lines. Violence thrives in that space. So does antisemitism.
Sociologist Émile Durkheim warned that societies depend on shared moral frameworks to restrain individual impulses. When those frameworks weaken, violence becomes expressive rather than exceptional. Rampages become signals — not just of individual breakdown, but of collective uncertainty about what can and should be enforced.
Jews recognize this pattern because history has trained us to. Antisemitism rarely begins with laws or decrees. It begins with atmospheres. With what is tolerated. With what is explained away. With what authorities are reluctant to name because naming it might require action.
The Bondi Beach attack belongs to this broader moment. It targeted a Jewish holiday gathering, but it also reflected a wider failure to defend basic moral boundaries in public life. Violence does not emerge in a vacuum. It feeds on ambiguity — on the sense that enforcement is conditional and outrage selective.
Hanukkah offers a counterpoint to that ambiguity.
The story of the oil is not a story about optimism. It is a story about responsibility. Someone chose to protect what was sacred when it would have been easier to surrender it. Someone insisted that desecration was not normal, that collapse did not deserve accommodation, and that continuity required effort.
That insistence feels increasingly countercultural.
In recent years, Western elites have grown uncomfortable making firm moral judgments. Everything must be contextualized. Everything must be balanced. Everything must be filtered through the language of grievance. But pluralism does not survive without boundaries. And minorities suffer first when those boundaries dissolve.
For Jews, the post-October 7 world has made something painfully clear: condemnation of antisemitism has become conditional. Calls for Jewish death are weighed against political narratives. Jewish fear is treated as inconvenient. Jewish safety is discussed as a variable rather than a nonnegotiable.
Hanukkah rejects that logic entirely.
The holiday is not only about light. It is about continuity — the refusal to disappear quietly when the world becomes less hospitable. It is about maintaining Jewish presence, practice, and confidence even when public space feels uncertain.
Lighting the menorah is not an act of provocation. It is an assertion that Jewish life does not require permission to endure.
Bondi Beach will be remembered as one more moment when Jews understood something before others were ready to say it plainly: a society unwilling to enforce moral limits cannot protect its most vulnerable members. Rampage violence and chants of “death to Jews” are not separate phenomena. They are different expressions of the same failure.
A society that cannot say, without hesitation, that calling for Jewish death is beyond the pale is not morally neutral. It has already chosen sides.
The menorah burns not because darkness recedes on its own, but because someone insists — again and again — that darkness does not get the final word.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Australia’s ‘Hanukkah Massacre’ Is Worse Than You Think
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks during a press conference at the Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, June 17, 2024. Photo: Lukas Coch/Pool via REUTERS
Chabad’s “Hanukkah by the Sea” event near Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, turned into a bloody massacre on Sunday: 15 murdered and dozens more injured, as of the latest update.
Far from being an isolated incident, this nightmarish display of terror is only the latest symptom of a dangerous and systematic attack by the Australian government against its own Jewish population.
According to news sources, the terrorists were Sajid and Naveed Akram: a father and son of Pakistani origin who had pledged allegiance to ISIS shortly before carrying out their antisemitic bloodbath.
In one rare bright spot, Ahmed Al Ahmed, an immigrant from Syria, heroically risked his life to disarm one of the terrorists, likely saving many innocent lives in the process. Al Ahmed survived several gunshots and is recovering in hospital.
In the aftermath of this modern day pogrom, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese issued a statement in which he made no mention whatsoever of Jews, antisemitism, Hanukkah, Islamic extremism,terrorism, or ISIS.
Albanese referred to the massacre merely as “shocking” and “distressing,” and said that his thoughts were with “every person affected.”
Within hours, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu utterly excoriated Albanese, accusing him of “pouring fuel on this antisemitic fire,” and noting that he had sent Albanese a letter last August, warning of the very conditions that had brought about this attack, a warning that had gone unheeded.
In tandem with the Israeli Prime Minister’s vigorous public scolding, Albanese held a press conference, in which he finally condemned the Bondi attack as antisemitic.
However, Albanese continued to avoid any mention of Islamic extremism, despite Australian law enforcement having already publicly confirmed that the terrorists had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State terror organization (ISIS), and that they were carrying an ISIS flag in their vehicle.
According to reports, the Mossad had been warning Australia regularly for months about terror plots against the local Jewish community. Local police deny there were specific warnings about this particular attack, but Israeli leaders from all sides of the political spectrum countered that Australia had ignored “countless warning signs.”
Australia’s national failures are reminiscent of the Dutch pogrom of November 2024, in which local Muslim attackers violently hunted Israeli soccer fans through the streets of Amsterdam — after Dutch police ignored urgent warnings from Israeli intelligence.
The conditions for a similar massacre are currently shaping up in New York City, where the incoming mayor responded to a highly threatening antisemitic protest by accusing the local Jewish community of “violations of international law.” (I previously addressed both topics in depth at The Algemeiner).
For the past two years since the October 7 massacre, not only has Australia seen a massive rise in violent antisemitic attacks, but local Jewish leaders have consistently objected to the government’s permissive atmosphere toward attacking Jews, such as failing to apply appropriate penalties and needed protections.
Examples include frequent and enormous marches calling to “Globalize the Intifada” (a phrase that the United States Congress officially recognizes as a call for violence against the Jewish people), public calls to “gas the Jews,” as well as Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state last September, a move widely regarded in the Arab world as a reward for the October 7 massacre.
Like most countries with free speech protections, Australia also has numerous federal and local laws against incitement, which authorities have routinely failed and refused to enforce in protection of Australia’s Jewish communities.
Prime Minister Albanese has promised to respond to the massacre by tightening Australia’s gun laws. Ironically, Australia already has among the strictest gun control regimes in the entire world. Apparently, gun laws are not enough when a country permits and ignores massive hatred, incitement, antisemitism, ongoing violence, and affiliations with international terror organizations.
Who knew?
Given Australia’s ongoing commitment to a failing “strategy,” its continued protection of Islamist extremists, and its continuing systematic neglect of Jewish safety, it is safe to assume that this is only the beginning of more attacks to come.
Daniel Pomerantz is the CEO of RealityCheck, an organization dedicated to deepening public conversation through robust research studies and public speaking.
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Are We at a Tipping Point? Will Larger Numbers of Jewish Americans Make Aliyah?
New immigrants arrive in Israel in 2019, many coming alone to serve in the nation’s military. Photo: courtesy of Nefesh B’Nefesh.
In The Arc of a Covenant (2022), a comprehensive book about the history of the relationship between the US and Israel, Walter Russell Mead points out that, if not for the persecution and expulsion of Jews from Arab lands to Israel after the 1948 war, Israel might not exist.
At best, it would be a smaller, demographically weaker country, with about one-half the Jewish population that it has today.
Recent attacks and hate marches across the world (from chanting “gas the Jews” in Sydney, which led directly to Bondi, and so many other incidents) have had me wondering if history was going to repeat itself. Will these events result in a new wave of immigration of Jews to the Jewish State, particularly from the US, where the largest number of Jews outside of Israel live?
One particularly notable event was an anti-Israel protest at a New York City synagogue (the Park East Synagogue), which included violent antisemitic threats, like “we need to make them scared.” That the protesters targeted an event by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a non-profit organization that has helped thousands of North American Jews immigrate to Israel, makes it clear that demographics are crucial in the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians.
Statistics indicate that 3.5 million Jews have made Aliyah since 1948, when the Jewish State was established. The vast majority were Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and Soviet pogroms, and those from the Arab/Muslim world, as previously mentioned. Yet, despite the large number of Jews in the US, the number that have immigrated to Israel is quite small — approximately 135,000, less than four percent of the total.
The question is: will the unsettling events targeting Jews across the world be enough to reach a critical threshold, so that large numbers of American Jews decide that enough is enough?
American Jews have done very well in all respects, perhaps better than any other diaspora in the history of the Jewish people. Yet, when it comes to personal safety for Jews, it seems that even America is not an exception.
The new mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani, was disappointingly equivocal in his comments about the protests that took place at the Park East Synagogue, saying a house of worship should not promote Nefesh B’Nefesh events. Clearly, he has his own ideas about where Jews should and should not live.
This is not new. In the 1930s, the German antisemitic board game Juden Raus! told Jews to go to Palestine. Today, they are told to go back to Europe.
Israel is the ancestral home of the Jewish people, a home they never abandoned, spiritually or physically. Those Jews who reside in Israel are there by right, not on sufferance. Many made Aliyah for various reasons: religious, ideological, and economic. But the single most important driving force has been antisemitism. Those who seek Israel’s destruction should reflect on the fact that their own hatred has been the catalyst for Israel’s remarkable rebirth.
Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.