Moris Albahari

In memoriam

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 . 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 nine hundred members throughout the country, five hundred of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend. When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over twelve thousand. 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. 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 communities, 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 ten thousand — were massacred. Albahari was eleven 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. 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. "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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