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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.
—
The post Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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VIDEO: A song about a Jewish girl, Khaye, who died in Treblinka
One of the most renowned poems by the Yiddish poet Binem Heller is one he wrote for his older sister Khaye who perished in the Treblinka concentration camp.
In the poem, “Mayn shvester Khaye” (“My sister, Khaye”) he describes how, before the war, she would look after him and his brothers as their mother worked:
And Khaye remained at home with her brothers
She fed them and looked after them
And she’d sing them beautiful songs often sung in the evening
As little children grow sleepy.
After the war, Heller returned to Poland, hoping to help revive its Jewish cultural life, but he became disillusioned and moved, first to Paris and then to Brussels. In 1956, he visited Israel, which was then a hotbed of Yiddish creativity, thanks to a number of poets who, having survived the Holocaust, had settled there. Heller was warmly received and ended up staying in Israel until his death in 1998.
The acclaimed Israeli singer Chava Alberstein befriended him and other Yiddish poets in Israel, and in 1995, she and film director Nadav Levitan released a documentary film about them. The film, Too Early to Be Quiet, Too Late to Sing, includes a moving video clip of Heller’s wife Hadassah Kestin reciting “My Sister Khaye,” as Heller sits in the background, listening solemnly:
In 2001, Alberstein set the poem to music and recorded it with The Klezmatics, bringing Heller’s words to a much wider audience.
Musicologist Jane Peppler also performed it on the album “Rag Faire,” accompanied by English subtitles.
The post VIDEO: A song about a Jewish girl, Khaye, who died in Treblinka appeared first on The Forward.
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The Case for Zionism: Jews Must Always Act to Defend Themselves
People stand next to flags on the day the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages, Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, who were kidnapped during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, are handed over under the terms of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
As Israel marks tonight the beginning of Holocaust Remembrance Day, I found myself returning to a question that is not abstract, not historical, but immediate: what did we learn — and what have we done with that lesson?
I started writing this column after listening to Matti Friedman’s interview by Haviv Rettig Gur about his compelling new book “Out of the Sky” — the story of a small group of young Jewish men and women, most in their twenties and thirties, who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe on missions that fused intelligence work with a near-impossible hope: to reach Jews already marked for annihilation.
What stays with you isn’t only their courage. It’s the indictment embedded in the setting. By then, the leading powers of the world knew what was being done to the Jews — not vaguely, not abstractly, but in sufficient detail to understand the scale and intent. And yet the Nazi annihilation machine continued to operate at full capacity. Priorities were elsewhere. Calculations were made. The Jews were not high enough on the list.
In the interview, Friedman describes Zionism as “a call to the heroic impulse of the Jewish people.” That beautifully captures the spirit of those who volunteered. But it does not fully capture the conditions that made such a call necessary. That necessity was forged over centuries in which Jews learned — repeatedly, across continents — that when they did not act on their own behalf, no one else reliably would.
By the time Zionism emerged as a political movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this was not a new realization. It was the product of accumulated experience.
In Europe, Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and from Spain in 1492 — decisions made by sophisticated societies that had benefited from Jewish presence until it became politically or socially convenient to discard them. Across the continent, Jews were confined to ghettos, barred from numerous professions, subjected to forced conversions, and periodically massacred when rulers or mobs required a scapegoat. In Eastern Europe, pogroms were not aberrations; they were recurring events, often tolerated, sometimes encouraged, and routinely administered by authorities.
In the Middle East and North Africa, the legal framework differed, but the condition often did not. Jews lived under dhimmi status — protected, but explicitly inferior. That protection was conditional and revocable. Jewish communities in Fez, Granada, and elsewhere experienced massacres from the 7th through the 19th centuries. In the 20th century, that fragility fused with Nazi ideology and erupted in events like the 1941 Farhud in Baghdad — a pogrom in a modern Arab capital, not medieval Europe, where Jews were murdered in plain view.
The 19th century is often invoked as a European turning point for civilization — a narrative of emancipation and integration. But when it comes to the Jews, that narrative collapses under scrutiny. The Dreyfus Affair did not occur in a backward state. It unfolded in France, a republic that literally defined itself by liberty and equality. Yet the public degradation of a Jewish officer, falsely accused and convicted, revealed how quickly those ideals could be suspended when the subject was a Jew and the society was looking for a scapegoat.
In 19th century Eastern Europe, antisemitic violence intensified rather than receded.
The Holocaust is often framed as a rupture, a singular descent into madness disconnected from what came before. But that framing is wrong. The Holocaust represents continuity taken to its most efficient extreme: the same logic of exclusion, dehumanization, and disposability, now executed with industrial precision — and when the entire world refused to act.
This is the environment in which Friedman’s protagonists took action into their own hands. Figures like Hannah Senesh, 23, and Enzo Sereni, 39, parachuted into occupied Europe under British auspices. They were not naïve. They understood the constraints. They were explicitly made to understand by the British that saving Jews was not the mission’s priority.
They went anyway.
That choice — risking everything to reach other Jews marked for death, in a world that had already decided not to make that even a secondary priority — captures the essence of Zionism more clearly than any political manifesto. It is the refusal to accept passivity in the face of annihilation.
And even after the war ended, the lesson did not soften.
Roughly 250,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors remained in Displaced Persons camps across Europe for years. Not weeks — years. Stateless. Unwanted. Warehoused in the shadow of a continent that had just attempted to erase them. The world had seen the camps. It had documented the atrocities. It had declared “never again.”
And still, Jews were in DP camps. For years.
That changed only with the establishment of Israel — a state that, from its inception, absorbed those survivors and provided what no one else had: a place where Jewish life was not contingent on the tolerance of others.
This is the record behind Zionism.
The post-Zionist claim — that Jews were better off without sovereignty, that Israel somehow makes Jews less safe — requires the erasure of everything that came before. It requires ignoring expulsions, pogroms, legal subjugation, and ultimately industrialized extermination. It requires treating the Holocaust as a complete anomaly instead of a culmination. It requires believing that a world that refused to absorb Jewish refugees before, during, and after that catastrophe would somehow behave differently in the absence of a Jewish state.
Strip away the rhetoric, and the “post-Zionist” expectation is unmistakable. Jews are being asked — again — to place their survival in the hands of others.
History has already tested that proposition.
If Jews do not secure their own survival, no one else will do it for them.
And when they finally did — when a sovereign Jewish state took in 250,000 survivors who had nowhere else to go, when it replaced statelessness with citizenship and dependence with agency — that was not merely refuge.
It was justice.
Justice that had been denied for centuries — finally asserted.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.
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Iran Has Been America’s Enemy for 47 Years, Yet Critics Claim It’s Israel’s War
Illustrative: Members of the United Nations Security Council vote against a resolution by Russia and China to delay by six months the reimposition of sanctions on Iran during the 80th UN General Assembly in New York City, US, Sept. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
In light of President Trump’s decision to attack Iran, enemies on the right, left, and in mainstream media, accuse him of breaking his promise to put “America first” — with the slanderous footnote that the US started the Iran war solely at Israel’s behest.
In fact, the Iran war is very much an “America first” war — launched to neutralize one of the longest-standing, most dangerous threats to the US, its allies, and the Western world.
Notable critics on the right have slammed Trump’s attack on Iran, including former head of the US National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, who said Iran, “posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”
Hard-leftists have similarly condemned the President for attacking Iran on Israel’s behalf. Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), for example, accused Trump of “acting on the violent fantasies of the American political elite and the Israeli apartheid government.”
Legacy media, which take every opportunity to bash Trump or the Jewish State, have also accused the President of reneging on his “America first” promise and launching a war for Israel’s sake. An article in The New York Times, for instance, asserted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was “determined to keep the American president on the path to war.”
Against all evidence, Israel’s enemies have managed to convince many that the Iran war is Israel’s war, not America’s.
This “blame Israel” movement corresponds with another major spike in antisemitism. In just the first week of the conflict, global antisemitism surged 34%, rekindling the age-old practice of blaming the world’s tiny (0.2%) Jewish population for its gargantuan troubles.
For decades, Iran has attacked Americans and US interests, all the way back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Notable attacks include the 1983 Beirut Marine Barracks bombing, which killed 241 American forces, and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 US airmen and wounded about 500 more.
Iran was also responsible for the death of scores of US soldiers in the Iraq war, through its aid to terrorist groups there, and construction of IEDs and similar devices.
Iran has also consistently lied about its nuclear program, claiming it was peaceful, but steadily enriching uranium to approach weapons-grade levels. No one in the world disputes that Iran is trying to achieve nuclear weapons — the only debate was whether it was worth military action to prevent it.
Iran wanted these weapons so that it could blackmail America and our Middle Eastern allies, and not have to worry about an American military response.
It’s no wonder that before his death, Ayatollah Khamenei repeatedly declared, “Death to America is not just a slogan — it is our policy.” Thus, it’s no surprise that over the last 47 years, all nine successive US administrations, including Trump’s, have made Iran a foreign-policy centerpiece.
After decades of diplomacy and appeasement, one president said “no.” The administrations of Obama, Biden, and Trump (twice) attempted painstaking diplomacy to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program — to no avail. In fact, diplomacy only strengthened Iran and its terrorist network. The 2015 nuclear deal, for example, gave Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief, which the mullahs used to expand their nuclear and ballistic missile programs, and fund terrorist proxies.
In short, after 47 years of lies, diplomatic failures, terrorism, and the threats of an Islamist regime sworn to America’s destruction, Iran’s determination to obtain nuclear weapons left the US no choice but military force.
Nonetheless, the lie that the Iran war is being fought because of Jewish conniving — primarily for Israel’s sake — continues to spread. The result will be more antisemitism, more violent attacks on Jews, and more generational anti-Jewish hatred.
Our best weapon to fight this is to keep explaining the real reasons for the Iran war — and the very real threat that Iran poses to America, the region, and the entire free world.
Jason Shvili is a Contributing Editor at Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME), which publishes educational messages to correct lies and misperceptions about Israel and its relationship to the United States.