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The history of the Jews in Monastir reaches back two thousand years. Monastir Province was an Ottoman vilayet, created in 1864, encompassing territories in present-day Albania, Macedonia (one of the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, from which it declared independence in 1991) and Greece. On March 11, 1943, the Sephardic Jewish community of Monastir, historically the largest Jewish community in Macedonia was deported. The Jews who trace their ancestry to the Macedonian city known since 1913 as Bitola continue to call the city by the name it bore during centuries of Ottoman rule: Monastir. Between 1941 and 1944, Bulgaria, in alliance with Nazi Germany, occupied the Yugoslav province of Macedonia. On March 11, 1943, in cooperation with the Germans, Bulgarian military and police officials rounded up 3,276 of Monastir's Jewish men, women, and children, deported them to German-controlled territory and turned them over to the custody of German officials. The Germans transported the Jewish population of Monastir and environs to their deaths in Treblinka as part of their plan to murder all European Jews. ==Monastir Jews before World War II== Although Jews had lived in Monastir from Roman times, the Sephardic Jews, who originally migrated from the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century, became the predominant group in the town by the sixteenth century. They maintained a highly traditional and distinctive lifestyle characterized by residence in a Jewish quarter, attachment to the Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) language and Sephardic folklore, commitment to Jewish religious observance, and allegiance to Jewish communal institutions including synagogues, religious schools, religious courts, and mutual aid societies. In 1863, after a fire destroyed much of the Jewish quarter, the community turned to the Jewish world's leading philanthropist, England's Sir Moses Montefiore, for assistance in reconstruction. This appeal to the West marked the beginning of the Sephardic community's reorientation toward European culture and the gradual introduction of secular education and values into the population. These changes took place at the same time as new transportation links to Salonika expanded trade and brought economic prosperity to the Monastir Jewish community. This period of cultural and economic development was cut short by political upheavals in the region, beginning in 1903 with the Macedonian rebellion against the Turkish rulers of the Ottoman Empire. Ethnic violence among Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians over the future of Macedonia exposed Monastir to political violence and economic disruption throughout the first decade of the twentieth century. As a result, thousands of Jewish Monastirlis (as the locals referred to themselves) emigrated to North and South America, Jerusalem, and the Sephardic metropolis of Salonika. After the end of the Second Balkan War in 1913, formerly Ottoman Macedonia was carved up among Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece. Monastir, then renamed Bitola, was in the territory incorporated by Serbia. However, the Jewish community continued to call the city by the name it bore during centuries of Ottoman rule: Monastir. At the turn of the twentieth century, Monastir's Jewish population reached nearly 11,000, but by 1914 years of emigration had reduced the community to just over 6,000. During World War I, Monastir suffered two invasions and two years of bombardment. More than 5,000 Monastir Jews fled their homes and lived as refugees in the surrounding area. When the war was over, Monastir's Jews numbered just over 3,000. Bitola became part of the new state of Yugoslavia, and in the 1920s and 1930s Zionism emerged as the dominant force among the local Jewish youth. During those years, 500 of these young men and women emigrated to Palestine. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「History of the Jews in Monastir」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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