(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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Dueling pro-Israel and anti-Israel demonstrations at McGill University in Montreal, Canada; May 2, 2024. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
McGill University’s law school in Montreal, Canada lost the chair of its advisory board on Sunday, when he resigned from the position over what he described in a letter notifying the administration of his decision as an “escalating pattern of hostility toward Jewish students, faculty, and alumni.”
The immediate cause, wrote Jonathan Amiel, was the Law Students Association’s passing an academic boycott of Israel through a student referendum held on Saturday. If adopted as university policy, the measure would shutter partnerships with Israeli institutions, bar individual Israelis or known Zionists from holding teaching positions, and allow professors to refuse writing letters of recommendation for students applying to study abroad in Israel.
A majority, 57 percent, of students who participated in the referendum voted to approve it, with 67 percent of the student body casting ballots, indicating high turnout. It accused Israel of being an “apartheid” state and of perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinians, despite that the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics reports that the Palestinian population has “doubled about ten times since” Israel’s founding in 1948.
While a Jewish student is challenging the vote in court, as reported by the Montreal Gazette, its approval by the student body has, according to activists, left an impression on the Jewish community there while achieving a reverberant political victory for the student anti-Zionist movement.
“We are deeply concerned by the ongoing developments within student governance at McGill University Faculty of Law,” the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), a Canadian Jewish advocacy group, said in a statement.
According to Amiel, last week’s endorsement of a boycott of the world’s lone Jewish state was part of a broader, troubling trend.
“The referendum is not an isolated event,” Amiel wrote in his resignation letter, which he since made available for public viewing. “An institution once defined by intellectual rigor and principled debate has, in too many instances, become an environment where being Jewish, identifying as a Zionist, or maintaining any association with the State of Israel carries professional and personal risk.”
He added, “This includes the normalization and, at times, glorification, of events marking acts of mass violence, the obstruction of students’ access to classrooms and university facilities, and the use of academic platforms to legitimize or advance extremist ideologies.”
Amiel also charged that the institution failed to discipline “conduct involving harassment or intimidation.”
McGill University was one of hundreds of schools where anti-Zionists organized to celebrate Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, in which the terrorist group’s fighters slaughtered, kidnapped, and raped Israeli civilians during their invasion of the Jewish state.
Their activities culminated in an anti-Israel encampment which spanned across four months and did not disband until long after the end of the 2023-2024 academic year. While McGill officials took steps to limit the freedom of action of the group which staged the demonstration, such as bringing the issue before a court and denouncing the “obvious antisemitism” of its members, Amiel’s letter suggests that the university has not done nearly enough to combat anti-Jewish harassment and discrimination on campus.
“The defining feature of this period has been an absence of decisive leadership at moments when clarity and resolve were required,” Amiel continued. “In that absence, direction has effectively been ceded to actors whose objectives are fundamentally misaligned with the university’s core academic mission.”
McGill University has denounced the outcome of the referendum, with president Deep Saini saying, “The effects here are antisemitic, and that plain fact must guide McGill’s response.”
Amiel’s resignation comes amid an ongoing crisis of pervasive antisemitism on campuses across the Western world.
Earlier this month, the Union of Jewish Students (UJS) released survey results showing that Jewish campus life in Great Britain is rapidly deteriorating. The group found that 47 percent of Jewish students report having heard their classmates justify the Oct. 7 massacre in which Hamas slaughtered civilians and committed mass rape; 23 percent have witnessed Jewish students persecuted over their identity; as many as 36 percent have either lost friends in this new milieu or know someone who has; and a shocking 40 percent report “having changed their journey through campus” to avoid anti-Zionist protests occurring every week at some universities.
Some of the report’s most concerning findings focused on anti-Jewish sentiments expressed by non-Jewish students. Twenty percent said they prefer not be roommates with a Jewish person, while a quarter of students surveyed believe that arguing that “Zionists control the media/government” does not constitute antisemitism. Responding to a separate question, 16 percent expressed approval of saying outright that “Jews control the media/government.”
“This report demonstrates that antisemitism on campus is not isolated but normalized,” Union of Jewish Students president Louis Danker said in a statement. “No Jewish student should have to face social ostracism, abusive language, or physical violence — there is a right to protest but not harass. If we are serious about combating extremism in Britain, we have to start on campus, where half of students have seen glorification of Hamas or Hezbollah. Concerned sentiments and piecemeal progress are not enough.”
The issue is no less severe in the US.
In February, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Hillel International reported that a striking 42 percent of Jewish students reported experiencing antisemitism during their time on campus. Of that group, 55 percent said they felt that being Jewish at a campus event threatened their safety. Meanwhile, 34 percent of Jewish students avoid being detected as Jews, hiding their Jewish identity due to fear of antisemitism.
According to the data, 38 percent of Jewish students said they decline to utter pro-Israel viewpoints on campus, including in class, for fear of being targeted by anti-Zionists. The rate of self-censorship is significantly higher for Jewish students who have already been subjected to antisemitism, registering at 68 percent.
“No Jewish student should have to hide their identity out of fear of antisemitism, yet that’s the reality for too many students today,” Hillel International chief executive officer Adam Lehman said in a statement released with the survey results. “Our work on the ground every day is focused on changing that reality by creating environments where all Jewish students can find welcoming communities and can fully and proudly express their Jewish identities without fear or concern.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Eden Golan, Israel’s representative at the Eurovision Song Contest, reacts during a press conference following the official unveiling of Israel’s song submission, in Tel Aviv, Israel, March 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins
Eden Golan, who represented Israel in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest, talked in a new interview about still experiencing anxiety, fear, and nightmares of threats against her life two years after the competition ended.
“I’m always afraid. I look in every direction like a security guard,” the 22-year-old Israeli singer said in an interview published on Friday in the “7 Nights” supplement of Yedioth Ahronoth. “I’ve had recurring anxiety since Eurovision: I walk into a place, a restaurant, or a show, and someone shoots me from behind. I have recurring nightmares of people chasing me and killing me. But I’m learning to live with it. No one will silence me anymore.”
Golan told Yedioth Ahronoth that she also still faces antisemitism almost everywhere she goes.
“Quite a few of my performances abroad had protests,” she explained. “In Switzerland they threw red paint at the entrance to the venue, supposedly to say the blood is on our hands. There was one protest with signs against [Israeli Prime Minister] Bibi [Netanyahu] and against me. After all the threats I received, there’s definitely fear for my life, but what could be worse than what I went through at Eurovision?”
Golan participated in the 2024 Eurovision in Malmo, Sweden, with the song “Hurricane” and finished in fifth place. The song was originally titled “October Rain,” but the name and its original lyrics were disqualified by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes the Eurovision competition, for being too political since it referenced the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack in southern Israel.
Golan made it to the top five of the competition even after being booed on stage by anti-Israel audience members, facing death threats, and having a Eurovision jury member refuse to give her points because of his personal feelings against Israel’s military actions during its war against Hamas in Gaza.
Golan has also said she had to conceal her identity outside her hotel room in Malmo during the Eurovision contest because of the threats she received from anti-Israel activists, who were angry about the Jewish state’s participation in the international competition. At the time, the deputy director general of the EBU condemned the harassment that participating singers had experienced.
Noam Bettan is Israel’s representative in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest, which will take place in Vienna, Austria, in May. He is competing with a trilingual song titled “Michelle.”
A map showing the Strait of Hormuz is seen in this illustration taken June 22, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
In the war between Iran and the joint force of the US and Israel, the Islamic Republic’s strongest tactic is to obstruct shipping in its coastal Strait of Hormuz.
The regime has strangled the world’s supply of oil and natural gas by attacking several commercial vessels as they transited the Persian Gulf channel. Some of Iran’s naval weapons have killed members of the ships’ crews.
As a political matter, Iran hopes that creating a global energy crisis will generate opposition to the US-Israeli military campaign. But as a legal matter, Iran’s targeting of civilian ships is a flagrant violation of international law.
Article 16(4) of the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Territorial Sea prohibits “the suspension of the innocent passage of foreign ships through straits” such as the Strait of Hormuz. Iran signed the 1958 document, as well as an updated version of the treaty, the 1982 United Nations Convention for the Law of the Sea.
The regime never “ratified” either treaty because it did not incorporate the international laws into its domestic law. That means Iran never became a formal party to the two pacts. However, the “innocent passage” framework of at least the 1958 convention is considered legally binding on Iran through customary international law, a consequence of widespread maritime practice.
The United Nations Security Council applied the principle of innocent passage during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. The council rebuked both combatants for firing on commercial oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.
In the current war, the UN Security Council likewise chided Iran’s lethal interference with civilian shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. A coalition of 22 countries including two Arab Gulf states recently signed a joint statement that condemned Iran’s violent closure of the strait and warned of “appropriate efforts” to reopen it. A US military contingent is now headed to the strait, presumably to clear the key coastal terrain.
Iran attempts to evade its maritime obligations with two legal arguments.
First, it asserts self-styled “maritime claims,” in which every commercial ship’s right of innocent passage through the Strait of Hormuz is subject to the regime’s “prior approval.” Iran accordingly grants safe passage to vessels from “friendly” states like China and Pakistan but not ships that could “benefit the aggressors.”
Assuming an additional power of prior approval, Iran has threatened to impose toll charges on ships passing through the waterway. International maritime organizations such as the United Kingdom Maritime Operations Center have confirmed that Iran’s self-serving legal concoction is unfounded. In fact, most of the shipping lanes in the strait run through the territorial waters of Oman, which lie beyond Iran’s legal reach.
Iran alternately contends that its anti-shipping terrorism in the strait is a “tool of pressure” to combat the US and Israel, implying a right of military self-defense. But the laws of naval warfare do not permit attacks on ordinary civilian vessels as a means of self-defense.
Finding Iran in breach of maritime law is easy. Enforcing the law is another matter.
The International Court of Justice cannot assert jurisdiction over a state without that state’s consent. The International Criminal Court lacks authority over Iran because the state never signed the court’s enabling treaty. The Security Council could vote on Bahrain’s proposed March 23, 2026, resolution authorizing “all necessary means” to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. But the measure would probably be vetoed by Russia and/or China, states that oppose the use of force against Iran.
At stake is nothing less than freedom of navigation, which is vital to global trade and security. If Iran can paralyze the Strait of Hormuz, other nations may block similar chokepoints such as the Strait of Taiwan, the Turkish Straits, the Panama Canal, or the Suez Canal. The resulting chaos could render maritime law a dead letter.
It may be difficult for American-Israeli warfare to release Iran’s illegal grip on the Strait of Hormuz. Nevertheless, military action may be the only way to restore the rule of law in the waterway and deter future maritime aggressions.
Joel M. Margolis is the legal commentator of the American Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, US Affiliate of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists. He is the author of The Israeli-Palestinian Legal War.