Zemun

Zemun is a city in today's Serbia situated beside the mouth of the Sava River as it joins the Danube, with Serbia's capital, Belgrade, right across, sprawling the right-hand shores of Sava's confluence with Danube. Today, Zemun is administratively part of the urban agglomeration of Belgrade, but retains a distinct identity as formerly a separate city. Jews arrived in the region, which was part of the Habsburg empire ruled from Vienna, together with Christian migrants from Germany during the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1739, as Belgrade fell back under the control of the Ottoman empire, twenty Jews moved from Belgrade to Zemun, marking the foundation of the town's Jewish community with the establishment of the Jewish cemetery in the same year.

Jewish Life Under Habsburg Rule

As elsewhere in the Habsburg empire, Jews were second-class citizens, limited in movement, profession, and religious freedoms, until the emancipation process started in the mid-nineteenth century. The 1746 establishment of Habsburg empire's defensive cordon against potential Ottoman invasions—the 'Military Frontier,' which included Zemun—made the conditions of Jewish life in the region even more difficult, as Jews were prohibited from inhabiting the border area. In 1753, Empress Maria Theresa allowed the Jewish families that moved to Zemun before the establishment of the Military Frontier to remain in the town. The community struggled with antisemitism, which in the historical record was most prominently expressed in frequent, ever-evolving professional limitations exacted by Christian competitors desiring to increase their own profits at the expense of Jewish 'outsiders.'

Building a Community

The earliest reference to a synagogue in Zemun dates from 1774, ostensibly referring to a space for religious worship that was part of a larger complex. The community laid the foundations for a dedicated synagogue building in 1850, completing the construction in 1863.

In 1868, Emperor Franz Joseph I granted equal confessional rights to Jews in the Military Frontier, ending the previous limitations and sparking an increase in Jewish population. By 1912, the number of Jewish Zemunians grew to 1200. However, as the Habsburg empire lost the First World War and fell apart, Zemun became part of the newly established Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later renamed Kingdom of Yugoslavia. No longer a border trading post, economic opportunities in Zemun sharply decreased, causing many Jews to move away. The community was halved to around 600 people, population size that remained more or less stable throughout the interwar period. The Jewish People's Calendar for 1935-1936 listed 439 members for the Ashkenazi community organization and 92 members for the Sephardic one. Not all Jewish inhabitants of Zemun were members of these two local community organizations, as some belonged to those in other municipalities and some to none at all. The community was very active, with many clubs and associations, as well as a strong Zionist movement that made significant contributions to the development and growth of the Zionist idea in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and beyond. Zemun's Zionists were especially proud of the fact that Theodore Herzl's paternal grandparents hailed from their community.

There were no Orthodox Jews in Zemun and the Jewish inhabitants did not differ in outward appearance from other townsfolk. The community was well integrated into the social life, with the town's non-Jewish intellectual, economic, and political elite regularly attending the annual Purim celebration.

Prelude to Persecution

As the Second World War approached, the membership of the Ashkenazi community organization rapidly decreased – 504 in 1937-1938, 352 in 1939-1940, and 34 in 1940-1941. This was due to a combination of Zionism – Jews emigrating to the British Mandate of Palestine – and increasingly discriminatory anti-Jewish policies, such as "numerus clausus," in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which, like other states in Europe's southeast, was under pressure from, and eventually signed an alliance with, Nazi Germany. This alliance was later overturned in popular protests of March 27, 1941, that succeeded in overthrowing and replacing the government, an event that triggered the April 6 1941 Axis invasion of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

German Occupation and Anti-Jewish Measures

German troops entered Zemun on April 12, 1941. As the Axis occupiers dismembered the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and formed the Independent State of Croatia, installing the Croat far-right Ustaša movement to rule the new country, Syrmia, the region in which Zemun was located, was joined to the Ustaša state. However, Zemun remained under de facto Nazi German control until October 1941. A large portion of the local ethnic German community, numbering around 10.000 people in 1941, was already Nazified before the Axis invasion through community associations financed by Berlin and subject to Nazi propaganda, greeting the German troops as liberators. Before the invasion, Zemun's leading Nazis—among others attorney Hans Mozer, head of "Kulturbund", and brothers Rudolf and Paul Tajs (Teis), the latter joining the Gestapo—formed an organization called "Judenkontrolle" ("Jew control"), which collected information on local Jews that was later used for anti-Jewish persecution. Like with other Jewish communities under Ustaša and Nazi control, Zemun's Jews were ordered to collect a "contribution," which in their case amounted to more than one million Yugoslav dinars.

Already on April 14, 1941, the German authorities issued an order to all male Jews from 15 to 60 and female Jews from 15 to 40 years of age to report to the police station in order to determine their ability for compulsory labor. Another, simultaneous order required Jews to wear a yellow band inscribed with the word "Jude" and issued a series of prohibitions. Jews were barred from entering all public spaces and venues; attending school; leaving their houses from 8 PM until 5 AM; walking in the street on Sundays; gathering in groups of more than five people, which prevented certain Jewish religious rituals; and engaging in any economic activity. By late April 1941, the new authorities prohibited the operation of the Jewish community organization.

Expropriation and Forced Labor

Other measures were consistent with anti-Jewish policy across the NDH. Confiscations, expropriations, and evictions started almost immediately, with local ardent Nazis such as Rudolf Tajs (Teis) and Ernest Eger providing crucial assistance. The new authorities immediately arrested richer and more prominent Jews, setting exorbitant "bails" for their release as another extortion scheme. "Commissioners" were assigned to take over Jewish businesses; in Zemun, commissioners were mostly local ethnic Germans, but also some local Croats. By November 1941, Jews of Zemun lost all their property to various forms of expropriation and state-mandated nationalization.

Stripped of property and freedom of movement while forced to do twelve hours of labor per day, Zemun's Jews found it hard to find ways of feeding their families. Forced laborers had to secure their own food. Most forced labor assignments served the needs of the German army. Labor squads worked at the Zemun port, cleaned the buildings appropriated for the housing of German soldiers, performed heavy labor in various warehouses the occupying army established, and loaded various kinds of cargo on outgoing trains at the Zemun railway station, much of it stolen goods being shipped to Germany. At the military bakery, the guards did not allow more than one person to carry the 85-kilogram (approximately 187 lb.) sacks of flour. At the "Zemun Magistrate," an administrative office building, the Jewish labor squad mostly did pointless work, meant to physically exhaust them, such as moving furniture between rooms and floors. The Zemun – Novi Grad railway station, guarded by Germans from Sudetenland—part of interwar Czechoslovakia that Nazi Germany annexed with Western powers' acquiescence at the 1938 Munich Conference—was a rare place where the Jewish forced labor squad encountered virtually no harassment.

Sajmište Death Camp

Zemun carries a tragic significance as the town next to which the German occupying force organized the first concentration and extermination camp in former Yugoslavia, known as "Sajmište." Before the rapidly growing city of Belgrade absorbed Zemun as a smaller nearby counterpart, in 1937 local authorities built the Belgrade "sajmište"—meaning "fairground"—in Zemun's vicinity, a cluster of buildings and pavilions that mostly stood empty at the moment of Axis invasion. Named Judenlager Semlin—the "Zemun Jewish camp"—the fairground complex was adapted as an internment facility and put in operation starting in September 1941. Occupying Germans envisioned the camp as serving the needs of their measures against Serbia's Jews and as a large-scale internment facility for many thousands of rebels who joined the anti-Axis uprising that spread across the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia after Germany's 22 June 1941 attack against the Soviet Union.

The majority of Jews who ended up in Sajmište death camp were women, children, and the elderly. Between seven and ten thousand Jews, hailing mostly from German-occupied Serbia, were killed in the camp, alongside around ten thousand Serbs and hundreds of Roma. A large part of Jewish victims of Sajmište were killed in a gas van that arrived from Berlin to Serbia in March 1942, later transferred to Belarus for the purpose of gassing the Jews of Minsk.

Importantly, Sajmište was located in the territory of the Independent State of Croatia but remained under the administration of the German occupation force in Serbia until May 1944—renamed Anhaltelager Semlin ("Zemun concentration camp") after all Jewish inmates had been killed. Ustaša authorities gave the Nazi German representatives the permission to operate a camp in Croatian territory under the condition that camp guards not be Serbian but German. Tellingly, the Jewish community of Zemun, large by Yugoslav standards and located right next to Sajmište death camp, was not destroyed there. Residing in the territory of Ustaša Croatia, Zemun's Jewish community was under Ustaša jurisdiction and was hence deported to Ustaša facilities, demonstrating the independent, Ustaša-envisioned and Ustaša-organized nature of the Holocaust in Croatia.

Deportation to Jasenovac

During the night between July 26 and 27, 1942, therefore, local members of Ustaša structures—assisted by local German Volksgruppe authorities—rounded up all Jews in Zemun, marching them to the railway station, where they were forced into boxcars and transported some 300 kilometers away to Jasenovac death camp complex.

Danilo Fogel lists 574 victims of the Holocaust, most of whom perished in the Jasenovac death camp complex and some in Auschwitz. The killed represented some 90% of the prewar community. The sole Jewish Zemunian who survived Jasenovac was Ervin Rozenberg, whose testimony is kept at the Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Resistance and Survival

A number of Zemunian Jews joined the Yugoslav Partisan resistance forces. Nine of them survived both the war and the Holocaust in Partisan uniform: Aleksandar Švicer - Šani, Jakov and Beti Čelebi, Estera Demajo Čelebi, Sofija Arandelovic-Čelebi, Jakob Nojman, Ervin Rozenberg, Mirko Majer, Edita Pisker, Danilo Fogel, and Josip Beherano; the latter three received prestigious medals for battlefield valor. However, many Zemunian Jewish Partisans were killed in action, fighting Axis, Ustaša, and Četnik (Serbian fascists) forces.

Survivor Edita Pisker and fallen Partisan Jelisaveta Suzana Šalgo, prewar members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, are today remembered as organizers of the resistance movement in Zemun.

Postwar Reconstruction

The Jewish community of Zemun is among the few communities in the former NDH that were reestablished after the Holocaust. Yugoslav Partisans liberated Zemun on October 22, 1944. Johan Goldštajn (Goldstein) almost immediately reestablished the Jewish community organization, which at first numbered ten members, growing to forty in the first month, as survivors gradually returned home. The community attempted to salvage the remnants of its heritage, recovering only a few objects from the Ashkenazi and Sephardic temples.

The Yugoslav state, a socialist economy ruled by a communist party that discouraged Jewish as well as any other religious activity, provided no concessions to the decimated Jewish community and treated them as it did any other group, returning all their property that the Ustaša state confiscated. Eventually, however, some of what the state determined as excess property was nationalized. Most prominently, in mid-1950s the state nationalized the Jewish school building, which provided a steady rent income for the community. While the community had already attempted to sell the synagogue in 1950 in order to secure the funds needed to continue supporting the elderly and disabled survivors, the loss of the school building cemented the decision. The community sold the synagogue to the municipality of Zemun in 1962. Municipal representatives broke their verbal promises that the synagogue would be used as a cultural center, leasing the building for warehousing, a night club, a bar, and for offices of various political organizations. In recent years, the synagogue has served as a restaurant. In 2020, the building was restituted and returned to the Jewish community; in agreement with the community, the restaurant remains, but the rest of the building their ancestors erected in 1850s and 1860s now again serves the religious and communal needs of Zemun's Jews.

Mapping the Holocaust in Croatia