Sephardic Jewish History and Genealogy in North Macedonia: Bitola (Monastir), Skopje and Štip

North Macedonia held one of the oldest and most completely destroyed Sephardi communities in Europe.

In March 1943 the Bulgarian occupation authorities rounded up virtually every Jew in the country — some 7,200 people from Bitola, Skopje and Štip — held them in a tobacco warehouse in Skopje for eleven days, and handed them to the Germans. They were sent to Treblinka. Almost none survived. No Jewish community in Europe suffered a higher proportion of destruction.

About sixty-six Jews live in North Macedonia today, almost all in Skopje.

The community was Sephardi and Ladino-speaking, descended from refugees who reached the Ottoman Balkans after 1492. It settled onto a much older Jewish presence: the synagogue at Stobi is documented by a third-century inscription, and Romaniote Jews lived in the region through the Byzantine and medieval centuries. Bitola — Monastir in Turkish and in Ladino — was the largest community and is the one most likely to concern researchers.

This page focuses on Sephardi genealogy. The Holocaust is covered only so far as it bears on records, because it is thoroughly documented elsewhere and because the pre-war community deserves treatment in its own right.

Which name should you search under?

The same places carry several names, and you will meet all of them in the records.

Bitola is the Slavic name. Monastir is the Ottoman Turkish name and the one Sephardim used; Manastir is the Albanian form; Bitolj is the older Serbian spelling. All are the same city.

Skopje is Üsküb in Ottoman Turkish, Shkup in Albanian, and Scopia in the Italian and Portuguese of the western Sephardi records.

Štip and Ohrid keep their names more or less intact.

One warning: there is another Monastir in Tunisia, and Essaouira in Morocco was sometimes called Mogador rather than Monastir, but confusion does occur. Check the country before assuming.

The territory has also changed hands repeatedly, and records follow the ruler rather than the ground: Ottoman until 1912, Serbian from 1912, Yugoslav from 1918, Bulgarian-occupied 1941–1944, Yugoslav again, and independent from 1991.

How old is the Jewish presence here?

Much older than the Sephardim.

The Stobi synagogue inscription of Claudius Tiberius Polycharmos dates to the second or third century and is among the most important such inscriptions found anywhere in the diaspora. Judah Leon Mosconi, the fourteenth-century grammarian and scholar, was born at Ohrid in 1328 and later became physician to the king of Majorca. A synagogue, Beth Aharon, existed at Skopje by 1366.

Sephardim arrived after 1492, welcomed into the Ottoman Empire by Bayezid II with rights to own property, build synagogues and trade freely.

The Jewish cemetery at Bitola is said to have been established in 1497, which would make it the oldest in the country and possibly in the Balkans — though the claim rests on a sign erected by Rabbi Shabtai Djaen when he restored the cemetery in the 1920s, and what evidence he had is not known.

The founding group at Bitola is thought to have come from Aragon, because the oldest congregation was called Kal di Aragon. That is an inference from a name, not a documented origin, and it should be treated as such.

The growth is documented in Ottoman censuses. Bitola held 43 Jewish households in 1528 and 285 forty years later — a sixfold increase in two generations. Where those families came from is not established.

Were these communities connected to Amsterdam and Venice?

Yes, and earlier than the standard accounts allow.

Portuguese Jews are reported at Bitola from 1626, and a Portuguese synagogue existed alongside the Aragonese one. That date can now be pushed back.

The Amsterdam Dotar register — the dowry society founded in 1615, which accepted applicants from across the Sephardi world — records a daughter of Isabel Roy at Monastir marrying David de Campos in 1618, eight years earlier. Further Dotar entries name daughters of Joseph Maestro at Monastir in 1624 and 1626, one of them at Venice in the same family group, and an orphan at Monastir whose parents had died at Venice.

Our own records hold a comparable case for Skopje: a Dotar award of 700 guilders in the Hebrew year 5420 (1660) to Sarah, daughter of Selomoh Pereyra, on marriage to Moseh Baruch de Scopia — recorded at second degree of relationship to a member.

The implication is worth stating plainly. Families in what looks like a Balkan backwater were connected to Amsterdam and to Venice in the early seventeenth century, well enough known there to appear in a dowry register, and moving between Monastir and Venice within a single family. The Venetian connection recurs often enough that it is probably not coincidence — the old land route from Constantinople along the Via Egnatia to the Adriatic, and thence across to Venice, was still functioning.

How did they live?

Bitola sat on a branch of the Roman Via Egnatia and remained a trade town. Jews there worked in commerce, weaving and tailoring; in Skopje they traded wool cloth and kashkaval cheese between Salonica, Constantinople and western Europe.

The community produced scholars out of proportion to its size. Josef ben Lev headed the Manastir yeshiva in the sixteenth century; Judah di Buton was rabbi there in the eighteenth. At Skopje, Aaron Perahyah ha-Kohen is the first known rabbi, Aaron Avuja founded a Talmud Torah in 1560, and Hayyim Shabbetai, Hayyim Baruch and Samuel Jakob Kalderon served as rabbis. Samuel de Medina and Josef ben Lev are associated with the wider region.

Sabbatianism ran strong here. Nathan of Gaza, Shabbetai Tzvi’s prophet, visited Manastir and Skopje in the 1660s, died at Skopje in 1680, and his tomb there was an annual pilgrimage site until it was destroyed in the Second World War. Nehemiah Hiyya Hayon, the later Sabbatian controversialist, taught at Skopje in 1689.

Ordinary life is glimpsed occasionally. An Ottoman court record of 1694 has Yako, son of Musa, a Jew of the Manastir district, winning a vineyard dispute against a Christian litigant named Dimo son of Petko — the kind of document that survives in the sicil court registers and that nobody has systematically searched for Jewish parties.

Restrictions applied as they did to all non-Muslims, sometimes eccentrically: at various points Jewish women were forbidden writing on their hats, and Jews were forbidden to wear green or brown fur hats.

Two disasters

Piccolomini burned Skopje in 1689, and the Jews fled; their synagogues and quarter wall were destroyed.

The great fire of Bitola in 1863 began in the Jewish quarter and left around 3,000 Jews — most of the community — homeless, with reportedly only six Jewish houses undamaged. The Ottoman government assisted; the community wrote to Sir Moses Montefiore in London, and the Board of Deputies raised some £2,000. The first donation came from the Spanish and Portuguese congregation’s captives-ransom fund, redirected because there was no longer any threat from Barbary corsairs.

Bitola never fully recovered. The provincial administration moved to Salonica, taking the jobs with it, and emigration began.

How many Jews were there?

The figures are inconsistent and should be handled carefully.

An evangelical mission report of 1850 gives 5,000 Jews at Monastir. The Orthodox Church estimated 5,500 in 1905, which is probably high. Around 1910, before the Balkan Wars, something like 10,000 Jews lived in what is now North Macedonia.

By 1941 the total was around 8,000: Bitola roughly 3,300 to 3,500, Skopje around 3,000, Štip around 500. Some sources give Bitola as high as 8,000, which conflicts with the deportation figures and should be treated with caution.

At the deportation, 7,215 people were held at the Monopol warehouse. Of the 3,276 deported from Bitola, none survived. Total Macedonian Jewish deaths are generally given as 7,200.

Surviving numbers are disputed: the Society of Jewish Communities in Yugoslavia counted 419 survivors in Macedonia after the war, other sources around 140. By 1952 there were 81. Today, 66.

Where did the emigrants go?

This is the part most likely to help a researcher, because the descendants are elsewhere.

Emigration began in the late nineteenth century as Bitola declined, accelerated after the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 left the Jews a minority in a Serbian nation-state, and continued through the interwar years.

To Salonica, first and nearest — close enough that many simply moved down the new railway, opened in 1894. The Monastirlis established their own synagogue there in 1927, Kahal Kadosh Monastir, one of only two Salonica synagogues to survive.

To the United States, in numbers. A mutual aid society, Ahavat Shalom de Monastir, was founded in New York in 1907 and by 1915 represented perhaps a thousand people. Congregations were established at Rochester, New York — Or Israel Monastir, from 1909, now Congregation Light of Israel, reported at 500 members by 1920 — and at Indianapolis, Congregation Sepharad of Monastir from 1913, with around 75 families by 1933, drawn by work in the Kahn tailoring company. Perhaps 2,000 people of Monastir origin were in the United States between the wars.

To Chile, and the chain is documented. A tailor named Alberto Levy Aroesti tried France, then Argentina, then settled successfully at Iquique on the Chilean coast, sent for his parents, and wrote to his brother describing it as a new Eden. The letter circulated in the synagogue and families followed. The Monastir community remains at the heart of Jewish life in that city.

To Palestine, where Monastirli families settled particularly in the Old City of Jerusalem, and where a community of Macedonian descendants survives in Israel today.

If you are researching a Monastir family, the records are more likely to be in New York, Rochester, Indianapolis, Santiago, Thessaloniki or Jerusalem than in Bitola.

Synagogues and cemeteries

Bitola had nine synagogues at its height. The two principal ones were the Portuguese and Kal di Aragon. None survives; two pillars of the Portuguese synagogue stand in a children’s park, with a plaque.

Skopje had three synagogues, including Beth Aharon and Beth Yaakov; Štip had two. The present Beth Yaakov community centre and prayer hall in Skopje opened in 2000.

The Jewish cemetery at Bitola is the major surviving site. Rabbi Shabtai Djaen restored it from 1924, raising money in the United States, and completed the work in 1929 — photographs from then show it densely stoned. During the Bulgarian occupation most of the tombstones were removed and used as building material. Restoration has been under way in recent years, promoted by the Jewish community and by researchers in Israel.

The gravestones matter more here than in most places, because they carry biographical detail — occupations, travels, family relationships — and because so little else survives. Recovering and transcribing them is the single most valuable piece of work that could be done for this community. We understand a transcription project exists but that the results are not publicly released; if anyone can clarify the position we would like to know.

Around twenty-six Jewish cemeteries have been identified across the country.

What records survive?

The central problem is that the community’s own records are largely gone. Anything before 1863 will have burned in the Bitola fire. What was kept from 1864 to 1941 is unaccounted for — possibly destroyed, possibly taken by the Bulgarians. Two Bitola synagogues are photographed post-war as a burnt shell and a pile of rubble.

That makes the external sources disproportionately important.

Ottoman records

The censuses are the backbone. Dragi Ǵorǵiev’s Makedonskite Evrei vo Osmanliskite popisi od XVI i od XIX vek publishes the Macedonian Jews in the Ottoman censuses of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, town by town, with names. This is the core primary data and the first place to look.

Beyond that: defter-i mufassal cadastral surveys, hâne defterleri household registers, and the sicil court registers of the kadi — the last of which produced the 1694 Bitola vineyard case and almost certainly hold more. Material is held in Istanbul, with copies in the National Archives of North Macedonia, and some has been studied but not for Jewish genealogy.

Consular archives

Bitola had three consulates by 1853, seven by 1872, and reportedly twenty later — British, French, German, Serbian, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Persian, Spanish and others. A small provincial town attracted them because the Balkans were the great-power flashpoint of the age.

Consuls reported home, and those reports sit in the national archives of the countries concerned. Where consulates extended protection to individuals, or employed dragomans, or reported on local communities, they name people.

As far as we know nobody has searched the Bitola consular archives for Jewish content, and it is one of the most promising untouched sources for this community.

Western Sephardi archives

The Amsterdam Dotar register, described above, names Monastir and Skopje families in the 1610s, 1620s and 1660s. It is worth searching in full.

Charitable appeals are the other route. When a synagogue burned or a community was in distress, emissaries toured the western communities, and the resulting payments are recorded in Amsterdam, London, Livorno and Bordeaux. The 1863 fire appeal to Montefiore and the Board of Deputies is one documented instance; there will be others.

Serbian, Yugoslav and Bulgarian records

Civil registration under Serbian administration from 1912. Yugoslav censuses of 1921 and 1931.

Jacob Aroesti, who had a photographic memory, returned to Bitola after the war and reconstructed names, addresses, occupations and photograph identifications for much of the pre-war Jewish population. Those records are held at the State Archives, Bitola division, and are not digitised. His yizkor book Bitoljski Jevreji is in Serbian.

Nadia Danova and Rumen Avramov’s Deportiraneto na evreite ot Vardarska Makedonija prints the deportation documents from the Bulgarian archives, including lists of deportees. Žamila Kolonomos and Vera Vesković-Vangeli’s 1986 collection covers the war years.

Aleksandar Manojlovski has published the minutes of the Macedonian Jewish religious community at Skopje for 1944–1946 and 1946–1947 — membership lists and decisions, valuable for tracing survivors.

Newspapers

No Jewish paper was published at Bitola, but the Salonica press covered it, and La Época is the obvious starting point. The Jewish Chronicle in London reported the 1863 fire. Serbian and Yugoslav official gazettes will carry references.

What has and hasn’t been researched

The Holocaust is well documented. The four and a half centuries before it are not.

Shlomo Alboher’s The Jews of Monastir, Macedonia is the standard account. Mark Cohen has written on the community, Jacob Aroesti compiled the yizkor book, and Zoran Georgiev has worked locally. Aleksandar Matkovski broke the post-war silence with his history of the deportations in 1958 and a general history of the Jews in Macedonia in 1983.

Nobody appears to have worked this community genealogically. The Ottoman censuses have been published but not used to reconstruct families. The consular archives are unsearched. The cemetery is not publicly transcribed. The Dotar and other western Sephardi references have only just begun to surface. The Ladino dialect of Monastir — shared, interestingly, with the Sephardim of Kosovo, which suggests a satellite relationship — has not been studied for what it might reveal about origins.

A community of descendants in Jerusalem is transcribing names and building family trees for Bitola, Skopje and Štip, and raising funds to restore the cemeteries. That work, when published, will transform what is possible.

Sephardic World lectures on North Macedonia

The Lost World of Monastir: Sephardic Jews in Ottoman and Yugoslav Macedonia — David Mendoza (2024)
Researching Jewish Ancestors in the Ottoman Empire — David Mendoza (2023)

[LINKS NEEDED — confirm and link before publication]

Organisations and repositories

Jewish Community of the Republic of North Macedonia, Ul. Borka Taleski 24, Skopje

Holocaust Memorial Center for the Jews of Macedonia, Skopje

State Archives of the Republic of North Macedonia, and the Bitola division

National and University Library “St Kliment of Ohrid”, Skopje — including Sharia court records

Ottoman State Archives (Devlet Arşivleri), Istanbul

Archives of Yugoslavia, Belgrade

Central State Archive, Sofia — for the deportation records

Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

Stadsarchief Amsterdam, archive 334 — for the Dotar register

International Jewish Cemetery Project

Help us find records

We are looking for:

A transcription or photographic survey of the Bitola Jewish cemetery, and clarification of the status of any existing transcription project
Any surviving register of the Bitola, Skopje or Štip communities — births, marriages, burials or membership
Confirmation of what happened to the Bitola community records kept between 1864 and 1941
Jacob Aroesti’s reconstructions at the Bitola state archive, in digitised form
Ottoman sicil court register entries naming Jewish parties at Monastir or Üsküb
Consular reports from Bitola naming Jewish individuals, from any of the twenty consulates
Further Dotar entries naming Monastir, Skopje or Üsküb families
Membership records of Ahavat Shalom de Monastir in New York, Or Israel Monastir in Rochester, and Congregation Sepharad of Monastir in Indianapolis
Records of the Monastirli community in Iquique and elsewhere in Chile
Records of Kahal Kadosh Monastir in Thessaloniki

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Macedonian Sephardi research means a community whose own records are largely destroyed, reconstructed instead from Ottoman censuses in Turkish, Bulgarian deportation files, Serbian and Yugoslav administrative records, and the archives of the communities the emigrants reached. It is difficult work, and the surviving evidence rewards patience rather than guaranteeing results. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

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