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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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In 1989, Harold Pinter and Jerry Schatzberg made the perfect Holocaust movie for 2026
The first hint that Reunion is an unusual kind of Holocaust film comes from a music cue.
An older man has traveled from New York City to Stuttgart, a trip that has clearly brought him immense psychological pain. His flashbacks to Nazi marches lead us to assume he lived in the German city during Adolf Hitler’s rise — but he doesn’t seem to know any German, opening every conversation by asking if the other party speaks English. Then he arrives at a warehouse, presumably to filter through belongings left to fester for decades after World War II, and begins a journey down a hallway that seems almost infinitely long.
As he walks the path back toward his past, the music marking his steps, composed by Philippe Sarde, is buoyant and lilting. The tune comes as a surprise. What’s this tripping sense of joy doing, following this man toward what we have every reason to assume is a museum of miseries?
Reunion, a 1989 film by director Jerry Schatzberg, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter based on a novel by Fred Uhlman, barely made a splash when it premiered in the United States, despite a largely positive European reception. Now, it’s being re-released, beginning with a two-week run at Manhattan’s Film Forum that opens this weekend. It’s almost a perfect Holocaust movie for our times — because it chronicles a moment much like our own, in which the gradual dissolution of society began to make itself known through the gradual dissolution of personal relationships. (Spoilers follow.)
The old man is Henry Strauss (Jason Robards) — who was once Hans (Christien Anholt), a lonely Jewish teenager at an elite all-boys Stuttgart school. The trip to Germany is his first since before the Holocaust. And the music, we quickly learn, is the soundtrack of what seems to have been the one great friendship of his life: it recurs at moments of particular meaning or joy during his brief, almost romantic engagement with an aristocratic boy called Count Konradin von Lohenburg (Samuel West).
The story of that adolescent friendship is the core of the film, an extended flashback to a time of great happiness as well as great peril, threaded through with that same uplifting melody.
Konradin is a bright, brave boy — ready to defend Hans to an antisemitic relative, or join his friend in striking back at Nazi youth who bully those without swastika armbands. But it’s also clear that he’s destined to get sucked into the Nazi machine: everything about his heritage, not to mention his prototypically Aryan looks, foreshadows that future. So from the first moment of his friendship with Hans, when the two connect over a shared love of collecting — with Konradin’s choice of companion clearly shocking a school in which Hans, as a Jew, resides somewhere far below the bottom of the social ladder — there’s a dominating sense of an invisible clock, counting down.
But oh, the halcyon days of this doomed duo.
They walk one another home from school, giggling in the age-old manner of teenagers for whom political upheavals are not yet real. They practice archery. They bicycle through the Black Forest, staying overnight at inns without the oppressive presence of their parents, whom both boys find embarrassing. (Konradin’s mother hates Jews, and Hans’ father is painfully enamored of Konradin’s elevated status.) When Konradin confesses that Hans is his first true friend, and Hans grins with quiet glee, it’s impossible not to hope that, somehow, they’ll stay this way — lovely, young and unchanged by the times in which they live.
For months, the Nazi threat only hovers around the edges of their relationship. Then it overtakes them. Rapid ruptures follow. And then it’s the 1980s, and Hans is back in Germany, seeking to figure out what happened to his old friend.
What prompts him to make the trip? There’s never a clear explanation. But it’s hinted that Hans has come to feel that he needs, at long last, some resolution to this passionate, formative relationship. He’s willing to risk his sense of self — the identity of the man who escaped to the U.S., and refused to ever speak a word of German again — to close that loop.
The sense that Hans’ whole life has turned on the events that marked his friendship with Konradin makes Reunion a profound watch, one that I suspect will be more effective for audiences in 2026 than it proved in 1989. Many of us have had once-close relationships begin to crack under the pressure of extreme polarization, and the insidious tensions of a political environment characterized by conspiratorial suspicion. Many of us love people we can no longer talk to, at least not freely.
It’s tempting to write these rifts off as personal. Reunion‘s terse message: don’t. A society doesn’t collapse all at once. It succumbs to hairline fractures; provoking a critical number of them is a strategy.
A Holocaust movie that spends so much of its runtime on a period of real contentment is an odd object. The break between its heroes comes late, meaning much of Reunion is a pleasure to watch. That is the point: under authoritarianism, life is still good until it’s not. Citizens have freedom, until they don’t. Friendship is trustworthy, until human weakness interferes. Liberal values are easy to hold onto, until you shake the demagogue’s hand.
But what makes Reunion most timely isn’t its somber portrayal of the connection between the minor tragedy of Hans and Konradin and the major one of World War II and the Holocaust. It’s that the film is hopeful.
To spoil the ending would be a shame. It is enough to know that Hans’ searching leads him to unexpected places, and while some are miserable and vicious, others are not. To let things stay broken, or assume that humans can’t change for good as well as for ill, is a choice. So is hearing and following the better music — the call to connect, and to resist being persuaded of something you know is wrong.
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3 more men arrested in London arson of ambulances owned by Jewish emergency service
(JTA) — Three more men have been arrested in London in connection with a series of fires on ambulances owned by the Jewish emergency service corps Hatzola, London’s Metropolitan Police Service announced on Wednesday.
Two British men, ages 20 and 19, and a 17-year-old dual British and Pakistani citizen were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson. The men were arrested at three different addresses, which were being searched, the police said.
The arrests follow the arrest last week of two British men, ages 45 and 47, in connection with the arson. Those two suspects were released on bail and are being closely monitored while they await a hearing, police said, and their identities have not been made public.
The ambulance arson, which occurred in London’s Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green, is being treated by law enforcement as an antisemitic crime, but authorities have not labeled it as terrorism even as the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit is leading the investigation.
“Since this appalling attack last week, we have been working continuously to investigate and identify those responsible,” the unit’s commander, Helen Flanagan, said in a statement. “We know concern among the Jewish community remains high, but I hope these arrests show that we are doing everything we can to bring those responsible to justice.”
A group called Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya, or the Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand, has claimed responsibility for the attack.
French authorities announced Wednesday they suspect that the same group is also behind an attempted bomb Saturday on a Bank of America building in Paris. The group has has claimed responsibility for a number of attacks throughout Europe in recent weeks, all of them up to now on Jewish institutions. Security analysts know little about the group, which was unheard of until early March, but say it may be tied to pro-Iranian cells based in Europe.
The London ambulance arson has given rise to a new set of antisemitic conspiracy theories. On Monday, the mayor of Bath, England, resigned from his position after drawing criticism for sharing social media posts amplifying claims that the ambulance fires were a “false flag” attack staged by Jews or Israelis.
Police in London said they would deploy drones to monitor security in Jewish neighborhoods during the Passover holiday, with concerns about additional attacks running high.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Influencer Myron Gaines performs Nazi salute, denies Holocaust death toll at Ohio University event
(JTA) — The influencer Myron Gaines visited Ohio University last Thursday as part of a national campus tour, performing a Nazi salute and claiming that the Holocaust’s death toll had been purposefully distorted.
Seated at a table on the campus of Ohio University wearing a hoodie that read “Let Em Cook – Oy Vey,” a meme mocking Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, Gaines greeted the students gathered with a Nazi salute before saying, “Number one, women are stupid, Jews control America and Blacks are criminals.”
Later during the event, Gaines, whose real name is Amrou Fudl, was asked by a Jewish attendee how many people he believed had been killed by the Holocaust, to which he replied “271,000 at best.”
During the ensuing debate, Gaines attempted to cut off the student, saying “hold on one sec, Jew,” claimed that Israel had propagated lies about the Holocaust’s death toll to serve its “victim narrative” and denied evidence that rape occurred during Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Referring to the war in Gaza, Gaines said, “If they could deny a genocide in 2023 all the way to 2026 with 1080p footage, what makes you think they won’t lie about a tragic event from World War II, from which they derive their victim narrative.”
Gaines’ visit to the school follows a series of incendiary campus appearances, including at the University of Florida and the University of South Carolina.
Best known for co-hosting the popular podcast “Fresh and Fit,” which centers on misogynistic views about dating and gender roles, Gaines has increasingly embraced antisemitic conspiracy theories since the summer of 2023, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In October, Gaines defended a leaked group chat where Young Republicans operatives praised Adolf Hitler, writing on social media, “Yeah we like Hitler. No one gives a f–k what you woke jews think anymore.” In January, Gaines was among a host of far-right influencers including Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate who drew outcry for singing along to Ye’s “Heil Hitler” at a Miami nightclub.
The Hillel chapter of Ohio University decried Gaines’ appearance on campus in a post on Instagram and hosted a lunch during the time period that he was slated to speak to offer students an alternative to his program, according to the Cleveland Jewish News.
“We are deeply troubled by the decision of our fellow Bobcats to invite a podcaster with a long and horrible track record of antisemitic, misogynistic, and homophobic content,” the Ohio University Hillel wrote. “At a time when our students are feeling especially vulnerable due to rising antisemitism, this choice is especially concerning.”
The editorial board of the school’s student newspaper, The Post, criticized the university administration for not releasing a statement denouncing Gaines’ appearance in an op-ed published on Tuesday. Ohio University did not immediately respond to a request for comment from JTA.
“A man who promotes antisemitic conspiracy theories, claims Jewish people control the world — as evident by the shirt reading ‘The Great Noticing’ worn by one of Gaines’ lackeys — and performs a Nazi salute on a college campus is not engaging in meaningful dialogue,” the op-ed read. “That is not a thoughtful debate, it is hate made into spectacle.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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