Sephardic Jews of Kosovo: Pristina, Novo Brdo and a Community That Has Ended

Kosovo held a small Sephardi community for roughly five centuries, and it has effectively ended. Perhaps fifty people remain, in Prizren, in three or four families. There is no synagogue; those who wish to attend services travel to Skopje in North Macedonia.

The community was Ladino-speaking and Sephardi in origin, descended from refugees who reached the Ottoman Balkans after the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. It was always small — a few hundred people — and it was concentrated in Pristina, with lesser numbers at Vushtrri, Mitrovica, Prizren and Novo Brdo.

It was destroyed in stages: by deportation in 1941–44, by emigration to Israel after 1948, and finally by the war of 1998–99, when the last Pristina families left for Albania and did not return.

This page is short because the evidence is thin and much of it is contested. We have tried to be clear about which is which.

What does “Kosovo” mean here?

Kosovo has been under six different administrations in the period that concerns Sephardi research, and the records follow the administration rather than the territory.

Ottoman rule, from the fourteenth century to 1912. This is the period in which the community formed and most of its history took place. Records are Ottoman, in Turkish, and are held in Istanbul and Belgrade.

Serbian rule from 1912, after the First Balkan War.

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia, from 1918. Kosovo was administered within Serbia.

Italian-ruled Greater Albania, 1941 to 1943, then German control to 1944.

Yugoslavia again, as an autonomous province of Serbia, to the 1990s.

Independence, declared 2008.

A family traced in “Kosovo” may therefore appear in Ottoman, Serbian, Yugoslav, Albanian or Kosovar records depending on the decade. Records were also physically moved: a substantial part of the Kosovo state archives was transferred to Belgrade in 1999.

When did Jews first come to Kosovo?

Before the Sephardim, and the first references are to mining and metals.

A record of 1442 mentions Jews holding rights in silver production. In 1498 or 1499 six Jewish families are recorded at Novo Brdo, the great mining town of medieval Kosovo, known across the region for precious-metal extraction. The Ottoman cadastral survey of 1455 covering the Branković lands — some 80 per cent of modern Kosovo — records a single Jewish dwelling at Vushtrri.

The dates are worth attention. Jews were present at Novo Brdo in 1442, half a century before the Spanish expulsion. The community that developed afterwards was Sephardi, formed by refugees whom Bayezid II admitted to the Ottoman Empire, but it settled onto an existing and older Jewish presence.

The single most useful early document is an Ottoman tax record of 1569–70, which lists a cemaat-i Yahudiyan — a Jewish community — with its principal families named: Navon, Bahar, Ruben, Baruch, Salamon, Cohen, Levi, Mandil and Konforti. These are Sephardi names, and several of them are still attached to the community four centuries later.

How did they live under the Ottomans?

Jews in Ottoman Kosovo were merchants, physicians and craftsmen. They were significant in the salt trade between Ottoman provinces, and the mining connection at Novo Brdo continued; later accounts describe iron processing and tin-smithing. Pristina held what was reportedly the best-known Jewish bazaar in this part of the Balkans.

At the end of the nineteenth century Noel Malcolm records 305 Ladino-speaking Jews at Pristina. An Austrian statistical survey of 1899 counted Jews among the smaller minorities without giving a separate figure.

Jewish life in Pristina centred on the Tophane and Velania districts, and many families lived on Divan Yolu Street, now UÇK Street.

How many Jews were there? A warning about the figures

The population figures for this period do not agree with one another, and some of them cannot all be true.

A figure of around 3,000 Jews in Kosovo in 1910 circulates widely, and the community’s own account gives 3,171, citing the Italian consul at Shkodra. That figure is very difficult to reconcile with what follows: the Yugoslav census of 1921 recorded 427 Jews in the territory of modern Kosovo, and other accounts give around 500 for the same period.

A fall from 3,000 to 427 in eleven years is not impossible — the Serbian conquest of 1912 drove out large numbers of Albanians and Turks, and may have displaced Jews too — but no source documents such an exodus. The 1910 figure may cover a wider area than modern Kosovo, or may simply be wrong. Treat it with caution.

The reliable figure is Malcolm’s: 551 native Kosovo Jews immediately before the Second World War. The community’s own account gives the same number, which is the one point on which the sources converge.

Between the wars the Association of Jewish Religious Communities of the Kingdom had two member bodies in what is now Kosovo, at Pristina and Mitrovica, comprising both Sephardim and Ashkenazim. Mandil S. Avram and his sons Nisim, Isak and Johan were substantial grain exporters from Kosovo to Thessaloniki until their bankruptcy in 1932.

What happened in the Second World War?

Kosovo was incorporated into Italian-ruled Greater Albania in 1941. Italian racial policy was not enforced with German rigour, and this — together with substantial protection by Albanians — meant that the community survived longer than most in the Balkans. Germany took control in September 1943, and the deportations followed.

The recorded deportations are these: some 88 Jews from Mitrovica sent to the Sajmište camp near Belgrade in August 1941; 51 refugees detained at Pristina by Italian police in March 1942 and handed to the Germans; a movement of around 250 Yugoslav Jews from Pristina into the Albanian interior in 1942; and, in May 1944, the arrest at Pristina of Jews sent to Bergen-Belsen by way of Belgrade.

The May 1944 figures are genuinely disputed, and it is worth stating the range rather than choosing one:

Malcolm gives 281 arrested and more than 200 dead.
Martin Cüppers gives at least 177 dead.
The Kosovo Jewish community’s own account gives 258 deported and 92 killed.
The Albanian historian Haxhi Bajraktari is reported as finding only 43 Jews among 249 deportees, most of the rest being Communists and Partisans.
Pavle Dželetović Ivanov puts the arrests at 400.

Malcolm’s summary is that 210 of the 551 pre-war Kosovo Jews had died by the end of the war. Even the Wikipedia account that reports this notes that it does not reconcile with the other evidence, and that the true number is unknown. We would say the same.

Many Kosovo Albanians sheltered Jews, and several have been recognised by Yad Vashem — among them Arsllan Rezniqi of Gjakova, honoured as Righteous Among the Nations in 2008, whose family is credited with sheltering a substantial number of Jewish families. Officials at the Prefecture of Pristina issued documents registering Jews as Bosnians. A list survives of 256 families, some 860 people, sheltered in Kosovo before being moved on to Albania in 1942–43.

What happened after the war?

More than half the surviving Yugoslav Jews emigrated to Israel after 1948, and Kosovo followed that pattern.

The Yugoslav census of 1991 recorded 112 Jews in Kosovo. The community’s own figure for 1999, citing the Pristina city archive, is 329 — another discrepancy we cannot resolve.

In 1999 the fifty or so remaining Jews of Pristina left for Albania, sharing the fate and the flight of their Albanian neighbours, with whom they had close linguistic and cultural ties. They did not return in numbers.

The community that remains is at Prizren, speaks Albanian and Turkish rather than Ladino, and has intermarried substantially with the surrounding population. Its leader, Votim Demiri, has an Albanian father. The Government of Kosovo has handed over a building in central Prizren intended as a synagogue and museum of Kosovar Jewish history.

What happened to the synagogues?

The Havra Synagogue at Pristina was built in the nineteenth century on the site now occupied by the Government of Kosovo building. It was dismantled stone by stone and rebuilt at Zija Prishtina, where the structure now houses the Stacion Center for Contemporary Art.

One source states there were once three synagogues in Pristina. The community’s own account says that synagogues survived the Ottoman period and were demolished under the communist regime in 1963, along with the Jewish bazaar — described as a deliberate erasure of the community’s physical memory. It also records a yeshiva.

The building now occupied by the Action Boxing Club is reported to have housed Pristina’s Jewish school.

What survives in the cemeteries?

Two, both at Pristina.

Velania, also called Taukbashqe, holds 117 graves, of which 44 have marble stones. They date from the seventeenth century onwards and are mostly Sephardi. It was restored in 2008 with Czech financial support. Gravestones were desecrated with swastikas in 2011.

Arbëria dates from the nineteenth century. Restoration work was undertaken in 2019.

Neither has been fully surveyed or transcribed as far as we are aware, and the Velania stones in particular — seventeenth-century Sephardi inscriptions in a community with almost no other surviving records — would repay it.

What records survive?

We do not know what Jewish community records survive for Kosovo, and we would very much like to.

Some Kosovo state archives were transferred to Belgrade in 1999. The Archives of the Republic of Kosovo and the Jewish community itself are the first places to ask. The State Archives of Serbia hold Yugoslav federal material, and the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade holds community records from across the former Yugoslavia.

Ottoman records

The Ottoman period is where most of this community’s history lies, and Ottoman record-keeping was thorough. Substantial material for Kosovo survives, in Istanbul and in Belgrade.

Defter-i mufassal, the detailed cadastral surveys, recording population, land use and taxation. These cover Kosovo from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and it is a survey of this type that produced the 1455 Vushtrri record and the 1569–70 list of Jewish families.

Hâne defterleri, household registers compiled for taxation and conscription, naming household members with occupations and tax paid. Sixteenth to nineteenth century.

Sicil-i ahval defterleri, civil registration of births, marriages and deaths, from the late nineteenth century to the end of Ottoman rule.

Court, land and administrative records, including the kadı sicilleri court registers.

Civil registration was introduced in Kosovo by the Ottomans in the late nineteenth century, administered through the population directorate. Serbia continued the system after 1912, changing the language of record from Turkish to Serbian.

Yugoslav records

Censuses were taken in 1921 and 1931. The Yugoslav statistical office was destroyed during the Second World War, but the State Archives of Serbia are reported to hold microfilm copies. Statistical yearbooks are available through the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia.

The Diplomatic Archive of the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs may hold passport records.

Newspapers

Several Jewish papers circulated in interwar Yugoslavia and are likely to carry Kosovo material — births, marriages, deaths, business notices:

Jevrejski Glas (Jewish Voice), Belgrade, 1911–1941, in Serbian and Ladino.

Jevrejski Pregled (Jewish Review), Zagreb, 1920–1941, in Croatian and Ladino.

La Tribune Juive, Sarajevo, 1928–1941. Copies may survive at the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, though the building was burned in 1992; the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade is worth checking.

Holocaust records

Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Shoah Foundation, which holds video testimony from Kosovo survivors. Jaša Romano’s Jews of Yugoslavia 1941–1945 includes Kosovo material. A 1960 report to the Serbian state security administration names victims from twelve families shot at Sajmište in the winter of 1941.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Very little, and what exists is dominated by the Holocaust.

Čedomir Prlinčević’s doctoral thesis of 1985, Jews in Kosovo until 1941, is reported to list Jewish families in the region before the war. If that is accurate it is the single most important genealogical source for this community, and we have not been able to consult it.

Pavle Dželetović Ivanov’s Jevreji Kosova i Metohije (1988) is the other substantial monograph. Noel Malcolm’s Kosovo: A Short History gives the community a few well-sourced pages.

Miloš Damjanović has written on language change in the Kosovo Jewish community after the Balkan Wars and the First World War, which is one of the few studies to treat the community as a subject in its own right rather than as a Holocaust statistic.

Nobody appears to have transcribed the cemeteries, worked the Ottoman defters for Jewish households, traced the families named in the 1569–70 tax record forward, or established what community records survive and where. A museum of Kosovar Jewish history was proposed at Pristina in 2016 and there is no sign it advanced; a building in Prizren has more recently been allocated for the purpose.

Organisations and repositories

Jewish Community of Kosovo, Prizren

Archives of the Republic of Kosovo, Pristina

Archives of Serbia, Belgrade — Yugoslav federal records

Historical Archives of Belgrade — Ottoman-era material relating to Kosovo

Jewish Historical Museum, Belgrade

Ottoman State Archives (Devlet Arşivleri), Istanbul

Oriental Institute, Sarajevo

Yad Vashem, Jerusalem

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington

USC Shoah Foundation

Help us find records

We are looking for:

Čedomir Prlinčević’s 1985 thesis, and in particular its list of Jewish families before 1941
Any surviving register of the Pristina or Mitrovica Jewish communities — births, marriages, burials or membership
A transcription or photographic survey of the Velania and Arbëria cemeteries at Pristina
The 1569–70 Ottoman tax record naming the Jewish community, in transcription
Ottoman hâne defterleri entries for Jewish households in Kosovo, of any date
Confirmation of what was transferred from Kosovo to Belgrade in 1999, and whether Jewish community records were among it
The 1921 and 1931 Yugoslav census returns for Kosovo localities
Any family papers, photographs or correspondence from Kosovo Jewish families, in Israel, Albania, North Macedonia or elsewhere

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

Kosovo research means Ottoman Turkish, Serbian and Albanian records held across at least four countries, a community archive whose survival is unconfirmed, and a population small enough that a single surviving register would transform what is knowable. It is difficult work with an uncertain outcome, and we would rather say so. If you would like help, you can hire a Sephardic genealogist.

If you have found this page useful, please consider making a small donation to support this site.