Abstract: The Semlin concentration camp (also known by its Serbian name Sajmište) was one of the main sites of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Serbia. Established by Nazi Germany in December 1941 on the outskirts of Belgrade, Semlin was one of the first concentration camps in Europe created specifically for the internment of Jews. Between March and May 1942, approximately 7,000 Jewish women, children and the elderly (almost half of the total Jewish population of Nazi-occupied Serbia) were systematically murdered there by the use of a mobile gas van.
In spite of its importance as a site of the Holocaust, for much of the post-war period the Semlin camp occupied a marginal place in Yugoslav/Serbian public memory. Even today, sixty seven years after the liberation of Belgrade, the site where the camp was located, best known by the name Staro sajmište – the Old fairgrounds - stands practically in ruins, awaiting conservation and transformation into a suitable place of remembrance.
The book Staro Sajmište: A site remembered, forgotten, contested - published in the year which marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of the Semlin concentration camp – offers the first detailed account of the post-war history of this place of the Holocaust. Based on extensive research using both archival sources and secondary literature, the book reveals a whole array of largely unknown details about the post-war history of this locality, and in doing so draws attention to the continuity in the marginalization of Staro Sajmište as a place of the Holocaust. By analyzing Staro Sajmište as a place that has been simultaneously remembered, forgotten and contested, the book makes a significant contribution towards existing debates about Serbian society’s attitude towards the past, especially towards the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Abstract: In this paper, the question of importance of Judeo--Spanish as the means for maintaining ethnic identity among the Sephardim in the territories of former Yugoslavia is investigated through an analysis of articles dedicated to the topic published in El amigo del puevlo (a Judeo-Spanish periodical which first was published in Serbia, and then in Bulgaria), fragments from the books by Angel Pulido, Los israelitas espanoles y el idioma castellano (Madrid 1904) and Espanoles sin patria y la raza sefardi (Madrid 1905),as well as unpublished documents from the Archive of Serbia and the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade.The present analysis suggests that a specific language ideology(negative attitudes towards the minority language in question) has played a crucial role in language shift in favor of the majority languages in the region (which has not jeopardized the concept of ethnic identity and membership), thus supporting findings by other authors(e.g., Myhill 2004, Weis 2000) that the maintenance of ethnic identity among Jews over the centuries has often been strengthened bycultural (religious, traditional, literary, etc.) rather than linguistic criteria. From the theoretical standpoint, this research clearly supports the view that the construction of ethnicity and ethnic identity should be viewed as a complex process in which different factors (language being only one of them) have different values and saliency at different points in time (e.g., see Fishman 1989; 1999)
