North Macedonia commemorated the deportation of the country's Jews to the Treblinka death camp at the Holocaust Memorial Center for the Jews of Macedonia in the country's capital of Skopje, Monday.
Seventy-six years after 98% of the Jewish population of what was then a province of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was rounded up and transported to Treblinka, in occupied Poland, a new exhibit was opened at the memorial center, which includes a 500-year-old Torah scroll, smuggled from Spain when Jews fled the Inquisition to settle in the Balkans.
Over 7,100 Jews from Skopje, Bitola and Štip were confined to ghettos ahead of transportation to the death camp.
Jews first arrived in what is now North Macedonia during Roman antiquity after fleeing persecution in other Roman territories. Today, some 200 Jews remain in the country.
