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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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Candace Owens and the Dangerous Myth of ‘Talmudic Jews’
Candace Owens speaks at CPAC on March 2, 2023. Photo: Lev Radin via Reuters Connect
In a recent viral video responding to Ben Shapiro’s accurate description of her long-standing pattern of spreading baseless fear and animus, Candace Owens urged her audience to “wake up” about Jews, Judaism, and what she called “Talmudic Jews.”
As part of that exhortation, she recommended a book titled The Talmudic Jew, presenting it not as a historical artifact, but as a suppressed key to understanding not only Shapiro, but Jewish behavior and morality writ large.
This is not a new genre of argument. It is one of the oldest weapons in the antisemitic arsenal.
Owens’ framing follows a familiar script: for those predisposed to view Jews as powerful, alien, or suspect, the explanation is presumed to lie hidden in Jewish religious texts.
The Talmud, in this telling, is not a complex legal and ethical corpus but a secret code — one that allegedly explains Jewish behavior and justifies suspicion toward Jews as a group. Owens’ invitation for non-Jews to “wake up” is actually an invitation to stop seeing Jews as human beings — let alone as neighbors or fellow citizens — and to begin seeing them as something else entirely: a threat.
In the same video, Owens widens the accusation. She urges viewers to believe that Jews are behind conflicts pitting “Christian against Christian” and “Christians against Muslims” around the world — an echo of a medieval antisemitic fantasy that casts Jews as the hidden engineers of war and civilizational collapse. This trope, documented for centuries, has no basis in history. Its function is not explanation but absolution: it diverts responsibility away from actual political, religious, and imperial actors, and deposits it onto a convenient, ever-available scapegoat.
Owens then extends this logic further, telling Black audiences that “white people” were not responsible for the Transatlantic slave trade — or slavery more broadly — and that Jews were. This claim is not merely false; it is grotesque.
The Transatlantic slave trade was a European enterprise, driven by explicitly European Christian empires — British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and later American — whose colonial economies depended on enslaved labor. Likewise, the vast Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades were driven primarily by Arab-Muslim empires and traders over many centuries. Between roughly the 7th and 19th centuries, European and Arab imperial systems conquered and controlled much of the known world — and they were the principal engines of slavery wherever it was practiced. Jews, overwhelmingly a tiny, marginalized minority without imperial power, were not — and could not have been — the drivers of these systems.
The Talmudic Jew, the book Owens cites approvingly as the purported “key” to understanding Jews, was written by August Rohling, an Austrian, German-language Catholic theologian of the late 19th century whose work relied on mistranslations, selective quotation, and outright fabrication. Rohling did not attempt to understand rabbinic Judaism. His aim was polemical: to portray Judaism as inherently immoral and hostile toward non-Jews, and to argue that Jewish emancipation in Western Europe had been a catastrophic mistake.
Rohling’s book was discredited even in his own time. Contemporary scholars demonstrated that he mistranslated Hebrew and Aramaic texts, stripped legal debates of context, treated marginal opinions as binding doctrine, and in some cases invented quotations outright. Yet the book endured because it served a purpose: it gave readers permission to see Jews not merely as wrong, but as inherently dangerous.
That durability proved deadly. In the 20th century, Rohling’s arguments were revived and repurposed by Nazi ideologues, who cited anti-Talmud literature like The Talmudic Jew as supposed evidence that Jewish tradition itself justified exclusion, persecution, and annihilation. The book did not cause the Holocaust — but it helped supply the intellectual scaffolding that made genocide conceivable.
Owens’ amplification of Rohling is therefore not incidental. It places her squarely within a long and infamous lineage of antisemitic accusations that treat Jews as the hidden hand behind social conflict, moral decay, and historical evil.
When Owens speaks of “Talmudic Jews,” she is not describing a religious practice. She is issuing an indictment: that Jews are governed by a hidden code that renders them morally alien and hostile to the societies in which they live. That indictment depends on a fundamental misrepresentation of the Talmud itself.
The Talmud is not a single book or a secret code. It is a sprawling legal record spanning centuries, comprising 63 tractates and more than 2,700 folio pages, dense with debate, disagreement, and layered interpretation. It preserves arguments rather than decrees, questions rather than answers, and features minority opinions alongside majority rulings. To lift a line from this corpus and present it as “what Jews believe” is not scholarship. It is distortion.
That distortion is not accidental. It is the engine of a genre designed to turn Jewish complexity into Jewish hate.
Candace Owens presents herself as a truth-teller urging her audience to “wake up.” What she is really doing is attempting to mainstream a discredited and dangerous form of antisemitic propaganda — one that history has already tested and found catastrophic. When such claims are broadcast by someone with her reach and influence, they do not merely misinform. They habituate. They train audiences to see Jews as a civilizational menace. And once a people are cast as a menace, cruelty is easily rebranded as responsibility — and even as self-defense.
Terrible moments in history do not repeat themselves automatically. They are repeated when influential figures persuade their followers that ancient libels are newly discovered truths.
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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We Need Elie Wiesel’s ‘Against Despair’ Right Now
The late Professor Elie Wiesel, speaking at the Algemeiner’s 40th anniversary gala, on April 22, 2013. Photo: Sarah Rogers / Algemeiner.
As antisemitism is again surging across the world, it can feel frightening and isolating to be Jewish.
The familiar question returns: how do we hold on to our identity and our pride, when the world seems intent on testing both?
Every generation of Jews has faced its own test of endurance. Ours is unfolding now, as antisemitism again plagues our streets, our campuses, and our interpersonal relationships. Many Jews feel vulnerable, isolated, and unsure how to respond.
In 1973, shortly after the Yom Kippur War, Elie Wiesel answered that question in a speech at the United Jewish Appeal’s National Conference.
Wiesel addressed a Jewish community grappling with fear and uncertainty, reeling from the surprise attack that cost the lives of more than 2,500 Israelis. Decades later, that speech, titled Against Despair, offers a roadmap for reclaiming our pride by drawing strength from our history and traditions.
Against Despair begins with a striking observation about our people: “To me, the essence of Jewish history is mystical and not rational. From the strictly rational viewpoint, we should have long ago yielded to the pressures and laws of the enemy … The mystery of our survival is matched only by our will to survive in a society embarrassed and annoyed by our presence.”
It is a reminder that Jewish endurance stems from the countless generations of Jews who chose courage over surrender. We survive because our history, culture, and traditions carry us forward in a world that has too often attempted to eliminate all three.
As he continues, Wiesel reminds us that no Jewish person is ever truly alone. He says, “When Jews are sad in Jerusalem, Jews everywhere reflect their sadness … An assault on Jews anywhere means an attempt to humiliate Jews everywhere.”
The individual may struggle, but we are connected across time and space. Facing adversity is not only about personal resilience — it is about our collective responsibility to safeguard the moral center of our people.
Professor Wiesel shows us how to confront despair head-on. He teaches that surviving and resisting antisemitic persecution while remaining Jewish is more than a physical phenomenon; it’s an existential one that has sustained Judaism across millennia, a way to honor all those who came before. He reminds us that choosing life is an active endeavor that takes precedence over mourning. Jewish joy and Jewish education are themselves acts of resistance.
“Faced with despair,” said Wiesel, “the most difficult but most beautiful [option] of all [is] to face the human condition and do so as a Jew … We shall resist them in our own Jewish way, which means that we will not allow them to tell us when to be joyous and when to mourn, when to sing and when to be silent.”
This is the heart of Wiesel’s thesis: Jewish identity is itself a moral stance. To live as a Jew is to face life, history, and human cruelty with awareness, integrity, and hope. Even when the world seems hostile, even when antisemitism threatens, Wiesel shows us that we are called to endure, to remember, and to celebrate Jewish life with pride.
Reading Against Despair is a practical guide for living proudly and resiliently in a difficult world. Ultimately, Wiesel asserts that despair is not an option. Jewish survival has always required vigilance, courage, and the refusal to let hatred define us.
“For this is the essence of being Jewish; never to give up — never to yield to despair.”
Every Jewish person should read Against Despair. Not simply to reflect on the past, but to understand how Jewish history, values, and traditions offer strength for the present. For Professor Wiesel, hope is not something one passively receives. Instead, it is a necessary asset we must create for ourselves, a personal duty we owe to our forebears and our children alike.
Against Despair is more than a speech; it is a call to action. It shows us how to meet the modern expressions of age-old antisemitism with the ideas that sustained Wiesel and other Survivors in the darkest of times.
Our very existence is proof that Jewish hope is not naive. It is our essence and our inheritance. We must follow Wiesel’s example by reminding ourselves and the world of how we’ve endured for millennia: taking pride in our Jewishness and fighting to ensure that our descendants have the opportunity to do the same.
Mike Igel is the Chair of The Florida Holocaust Museum’s Wiesel Archive & Legacy Council.
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If Israel Wants to Increase Immigration, It Should Take These Steps
New olim disembark at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on the first charter aliyah flight after he Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, arriving to begin new lives in Israel. Photo: The Algemeiner
Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, recently made an impassioned plea for Jews to “come home” in light of surging antisemitism around the globe, including the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia.
But antisemitism alone won’t trigger a mass exodus of Jews to Israel — at least not yet. If Israeli leaders really want to persuade large numbers of Jews, especially Jews in the West, to immigrate to Israel, they must make some fundamental changes to the country. Right now, there are too many aspects of life in Israel that make it unattractive to Western Jews.
For instance, the whole process of immigrating to Israel can be quite daunting, especially if Israeli authorities question your Jewishness.
While Israel’s Law of Return grants any Jew the right to come to the country as an “oleh” (immigrant), this isn’t what always happens in practice, particularly when radical rabbis get involved. Thus, a prospective oleh is often required to produce some sort of proof, such as a letter from a local rabbi, attesting to their religious involvement in the Jewish community, when all they should be legally required to produce is proof of their Jewish ethnicity.
Worse still, Israel doesn’t recognize many non-Orthodox streams of Judaism, which is extremely problematic considering that most Jews in the West are not Orthodox. In short, many Jews in the West won’t immigrate to Israel if the state doesn’t recognize them as Jews.
Many Western Jews who are secular also won’t want to live in a country where there’s no public transportation on Saturdays or other Jewish holidays and no civil marriage or divorce. Hence, if Israel’s leaders are intent on persuading Jews in the West to immigrate to the Jewish State, they should reform some of these onerous religious restrictions.
Another major impediment to persuading Jews in the West to “come home” is Israel’s living standards. Right now, most Jews in the West enjoy a better standard of living than Israel can offer. To improve Israel’s standard of living, the Bank of Israel, OECD, and Israel’s Ministry of Finance have made a number of recommendations, including increasing labor productivity by reducing regulation and encouraging more Haredi men and Arab Israelis to participate in the workforce.
One major problem with Israel’s living standards is the high cost of living, which is among the highest in the OECD group of countries. Few Jews in the Diaspora will want to immigrate to Israel if they know the country’s cost of living is so absurdly high. The solution advocated by the OECD, former Competition Authority heads, and social protest movements is increasing competition in the economy and reducing import barriers. Israelis pay high prices for many goods, especially food products, due to the dominance of large conglomerates and monopolies, as well as restrictions on imports.
Housing is also very expensive in Israel. In fact, housing costs are the single largest drag on household living standards in the country. To alleviate this, the Bank of Israel, State Comptroller, and housing task forces have recommended measures such as releasing more state land faster for residential development and speeding up the country’s planning and permitting process, which is among the slowest in the OECD.
Over the last few years, the government has made some reforms to lower the cost of living and raise living standards, but there’s still much more to be done. Change is slow due to many factors, including the nature of Israel’s fractured party politics and the difficulty of creating and maintaining coalition governments, as well as resistance to reform by powerful business interests. Furthermore, Israel’s immense security challenges consume budgetary resources, political attention, and bureaucratic capabilities.
Indeed, perhaps the biggest factor discouraging Jews in the West from immigrating to Israel is the security situation. After all, many Jews would be hesitant to leave the West, where the prospect of war is almost zero, and go live in Israel, a country surrounded by bloodthirsty enemies determined to wipe it off the map. Unfortunately, Israel’s ability to control its security situation is limited, because peace is simply not possible if Israel’s enemies don’t want it.