Belgrade
The Memory Lanes project focuses on Belgrade in Serbia. Click below to see what artistic projects the teenagers created in order to retell the stories of numerous Jewish men and women from the Centropa archive who once lived in their neighborhood or keep scrolling to find out more about the Jewish history of this place.
The first documents about the presence of Jews in Belgrade date from the 10th century, although some researchers believe that Jewish residents of the Roman Empire also came to Singidunum (as Belgrade was known at that time). Later in the 16th century, Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula (Sephardim) arrived in Belgrade, followed by Jews from Central European countries (Ashkenazi) in the 17th and 18th century. The Jewish population of Belgrade was mainly involved in the salt trade, banking, stock exchange business, and the textile industry. During the Second World War the majority of Belgrade Jews were taken to a camp at the Belgrade fairground - the Sajmište concentration camp (so called Judenlager Semlin), where about 6,000 of them spent their last days and were murdered in a ‘gas truck’. In the spring of 1942, Nazis declared Belgrade the first city "free of Jews". Out of the 12,000 Jews who lived in Belgrade at the beginning of the war, only 1,115 survived, and about 95% of the Jewish population of Serbia was completely destroyed. Today, the Jewish community in Serbia has around 2,000 members, with only one active synagogue remaining. The monument "Menorah in Flames" was placed on the banks of the Danube in memory of the Jews of Belgrade who died during the Holocaust.
The project is funded by the Foundation “Remembrance, Responsibility and Future” (EVZ) and the Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF).
