Jewish Women's Archive Honors Unsung Local Heroes During Women's History Month
Yugoslavia
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by Harriet Freidenreich
Little has been written about the history of women in former Yugoslavia and even less is as yet known about the history of Jewish women in the Balkans. Before 1918 the South Slav lands of the Western Balkans did not share a common history, having been divided for centuries between Ottoman and Habsburg spheres of influence. The creation of Yugoslavia after World War I brought together in one political unit Eastern Orthodox Serbs, Macedonians, and Montenegrins; Roman Catholic Croats and Slovenes; and Muslim Bosnians, as well as many non-Slavic minorities, including Germans, Hungarians, Albanians, and two distinct groups of Jews, the Sephardim of the former Ottoman territories, and the Ashkenazim of the erstwhile Habsburg lands. The Ashkenazim, who formed roughly two-thirds of the 68,405 Jews recorded in the 1931 Yugoslav census, were concentrated mostly in the somewhat more developed northern and western parts of the country, including Croatia and the Vojvodina, whereas the Sephardim, comprising the remaining third, were situated mainly in the poorer areas of Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia to the east and south. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia lasted from 1918 until its dismemberment after the German invasion in 1941; its Communist successor, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, was in existence from 1944 to 1991. Fewer than 15,000 Jews, scattered around the country, remained alive after the Holocaust; roughly half of these survivors made aliyah to Israel after 1948. Thus, Jews, who had never made up more than half of one percent of the population of Yugoslavia, had become only a tiny minority within a multi-national socialist state.
Historical Setting
Jewish settlements in Macedonia and Dalmatia date back as far as Greek and Roman days, and small communities existed in Slovenia and Serbia in medieval times, but the first major wave of Jewish immigration to the South Slav lands came as a result of the expulsion of the Jews from Christian Spain in 1492. By the mid-sixteenth century, Sephardim began to establish communities in the Balkan hinterlands of the Ottoman Empire, including Belgrade in Serbia, Sarajevo in Bosnia, and Skopje and Bitola (Monastir) in Macedonia, as well as in Dubrovnik and Split on the Dalmatian coast. By contrast, the Ashkenazi communities in the Habsburg Empire were of more recent origin. Until the end of the eighteenth century, Jews had been banned from residence in Slovenia, Croatia, and the Vojvodina (formerly Military Frontier), except for Zemun. During the nineteenth century, a significant number of Jewish families from various parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire migrated to the South Slav regions under Hungarian control. Substantial Jewish communities developed in Zagreb and Osijek in Croatia-Slavonia and Novi Sad and Subotica in the Vojvodina; there were also many smaller towns with significant Jewish populations. During the interwar years, there were 114 organized Jewish communities in Yugoslavia; 38 were Sephardi; 70, Ashkenazi-Neologue; and 6, Ashkenazi-Orthodox.
Unlike the overwhelmingly peasant South Slav population, of whom more than three-quarters lived in villages in the twentieth century, the Jewish population was heavily urban and middle class, residing mainly in the larger cities and towns. By and large, Ashkenazim engaged in commerce, white-collar occupations and the professions, whereas Sephardim tended to be merchants and artisans, though some, especially in Sarajevo and Bitola, were working class.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jewish families tended to be fairly large. Families with six or more children were not uncommon, especially among the Sephardim. However, during the twentieth century, family size decreased considerably, with one or two children becoming the norm and more than three, the exception. Among both Ashkenazim and Sephardim, girls generally married in their late teens or early twenties; most married women were homemakers although, by the mid-twentieth century, increasing numbers of women, especially single women, had also begun to work outside the home. As the century progressed, increasing numbers of women never married or remained childless.
On the whole, Sephardi women’s lives most closely resembled the pattern set by their Jewish sisters elsewhere in the former Ottoman Empire, but they were also influenced somewhat by the customs of their Serbian Orthodox or Muslim neighbors. Until the late nineteenth century, Sephardi society in the Balkans displayed an extremely traditional and patriarchal character, based on extended family circles, with several generations and often families sharing the same household. Sephardi women in major towns such as Belgrade, Sarajevo or Bitola lived within a very tight-knit Jewish society, having limited contact with the outside world and keeping their social and cultural activities confined largely within the Jewish quarter. They generally lived in one-storied houses built around large courtyards and furnished in Turkish fashion. Often groups of neighbors would gather informally of an evening, gossiping, telling stories, singing, and playing games, but young girls would remain separate and associate with one another only during the daytime. At family celebrations, especially weddings and holidays, the older women would sing romansas, epic songs from medieval Spain that formed part of their Sephardi folklore heritage. Most Sephardim in the South Slav lands continued to speak Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, as their mother tongue until the early twentieth century. Religious piety formed an integral part of their lives and traditional Jewish customs were strictly observed. Mothers, even if illiterate, passed on to their children a love and reverence for their faith, their home and their tradition.
Sephardi women thus lived a very sheltered existence in the South Slav lands before the twentieth century. In Bosnia and Macedonia, Jewish girls, like their Eastern Orthodox and Muslim counterparts, received little or no formal education. Remaining in the home to do housework and embroider, they married early, at sixteen to eighteen years of age. Daughters were often considered a burden and not highly valued as individuals, but married women were treated with greater respect, especially if they were mothers. They were freer to move around and looked after household matters themselves. Divorced women found themselves in a difficult position and were not fully accepted.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, gradual changes started to take place. By the 1860s, Jewish girls in Belgrade began to meet young men at dances and some of the older women abandoned their old-fashioned dress and customs. Like their Serbian neighbors, Jewish girls started attending elementary schools, where they learned Serbian and other subjects; those from wealthy families sometimes went to private schools, where they acquired knowledge of music, foreign languages, and handicrafts. In 1864, a public elementary school for Jewish girls, alongside a separate school for boys, opened in Jalija, the Belgrade Jewish quarter, with instruction mainly in Serbian. At first, many Jewish parents were reluctant to send their daughters to this school because they did not consider education necessary for girls. Regina Jeliševa (born ca. 1860) became the first Jewish girl in the Serbian capital to attend a public higher school for girls; after her graduation in 1879, she returned to teach in the Jewish girls’ school in Jalija. Soon, other Jewish girls followed in her footsteps in acquiring secondary education, although most did not go beyond the elementary level. Poorer girls, who in the past had generally been compelled to seek employment in the households of the rich, were increasingly being taught sewing and other useful trades. In Bosnia, advanced education for girls occurred only after the turn of the century. Regina Atijas (1901–1982), the daughter of the rabbi in Bihać, was one of the first Sephardi girls in Bosnia-Herzegovina to attend a classical gymnasium; she then went on to earn a medical degree in Zagreb during the interwar years.
Ashkenazi women who lived in Croatia-Slavonia or the Vojvodina in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were generally more westernized and more highly educated than their Sephardi sisters, but were less acculturated to their South Slav environment, since most of their families were relatively recent arrivals to the area. Their lives generally resembled those of middle-class Central European Jewish women residing in small cities and towns in Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, or Germany. They were generally multi-lingual; they often spoke German or Hungarian at home, but learned Croatian or Serbian at school. By 1864, the Zagreb Jewish community had established a co-educational elementary school where most subjects were taught in Croatian; Jewish schools also existed in Osijek and Varaždin, Novi Sad and Subotica. Over two-thirds of Zagreb Jewish children of both sexes attended the local Jewish school, where they received instruction in both secular and religious subjects. Elsewhere in Croatia and in the Vojvodina, Jewish girls attended both public primary schools and private schools for girls, some of which were under Catholic auspices. In 1872, the first higher girls’ school open up in Zagreb; twenty years later the first girls’ gymnasium was established; in 1901, the philosophy faculty of the University of Zagreb admitted women for the first time. Many Ashkenazi girls in Croatia and other South Slav lands continued their education in public or private middle schools and higher girls’ schools, while others chose to study in a gymnasium to prepare for more advanced education. Some of these young women went on to study at music or art academies; others attended university.
In the early twentieth century, a small group of Jewish women from South Slav lands received advanced degrees abroad, in Switzerland, Austria or Germany. During the interwar years, however, most Jewish students attended either the University of Zagreb or the University of Belgrade. By 1933, one hundred and seventy-five Jewish women comprised a quarter of the Jewish student population in Yugoslavia. Most of these women students were enrolled in either the faculty of philosophy (or liberal arts) or the faculty of medicine, while others studied law and engineering. Although increasing numbers of Ashkenazi women, and some Sephardim as well, were earning medical and other university degrees, higher education for women in Yugoslavia was still very much the exception rather than the rule.
As was the case elsewhere in Europe on the eve of World War II, only a minority of Jewish women had careers outside the home. Among those women with paid employment, many of whom were unmarried, some were teachers in either elementary or secondary schools; several taught in Jewish communal schools; others were physicians, especially pediatricians, or in other health professions. Jewish women worked as secretaries, clerks, modistes, shopkeepers, salespersons, and market vendors; others held jobs as seamstresses, textile operators, domestic servants, cosmeticians, or other types of workers. For most middle-class married Jewish women, however, their primary role was as wives and mothers, although they sometimes “helped out” in a family business. Before the mid-twentieth century, Jewish women thus generally appeared in communal and government records as either housewives or as widows. Many of these women became involved in Jewish women’s organizations and volunteered their time on behalf of the Jewish community.
Jewish Women’s Organizations
Jewish women’s clubs began to spring up in Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities in Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and the Vojvodina in the late nineteenth century, around the same time that Jewish and Christian women were creating similar organizations elsewhere in Europe. Although Jewish women were not treated as equal members of the Jewish community and were excluded from voting and participating in communal governance, women’s philanthropic organizations came to play an important role within Jewish communal life because they not only helped large numbers of needy Jews, especially women, children and the elderly, but also enhanced the communal spirit of solidarity and cooperation by holding numerous social activities and entertainments to benefit charitable causes and promote both Jewish and secular culture.
In 1874 a handful of Sephardi women formed the first women’s club in Serbia, the Jewish Women’s Society. In the beginning this organization, which aimed at helping young mothers and poor widows, had no executive board and no statutes and held no formal meetings. It recruited young wives as members; they collected money from their friends and distributed it to needy women. By the end of the century, this association had begun to keep accounts in Ladino; in 1905 Jelena Alkalaj Demajo (1876–1942), who had been a teacher in the Jewish girls’ school in Jalija until her marriage that year, became the society’s first secretary and started to take minutes of meetings in Serbian.
During the Balkan Wars and World War I, several foreign-born Jewish women physicians, including Eva Halječka, Hanna Hirszfeld, Eva Mitnick (d.1914), and Selma Eliasberg (d.1915), worked as volunteers in the Serbian Army medical corps, combating typhus and other epidemics. Members of the Jewish Women’s Society also contributed to the Serbian war effort, demonstrating their patriotism by helping the Red Cross prepare bandages and working as nurses in field hospitals. One of their leading members, Natalija (Neti) Munk (1864–1924), who had also been a volunteer nurse during the Serbian-Bulgarian War of 1885, received several royal decorations for her many years of service as a nurse at the front. The Women’s Society took upon itself the responsibility of looking after war widows and orphans, as well as helping refugees and families in distress with food and shelter.
After World War I the Jewish Women’s Society underwent extensive reorganization and, with Jelena Demajo as its president and Sofija Almuli as its vice-president, greatly expanded its membership and programs. When this society celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1924, 470 Sephardi women were counted among its ranks. One of its major projects was the creation of the School for Working Girls, which operated from 1919 to 1929, training young Jewish women as seamstresses. In 1923 a Vacation Committee began arranging for poor and sickly children to spend their holidays on the Adriatic coast. In the same year, the society inaugurated a series of popular lectures on medical subjects for women delivered by several of the local Jewish doctors. In 1937 the society erected its own building, which soon housed a day-care center that fed and cared for eighty children from seven o’clock in the morning until six in the evening. In addition, the Jewish Women’s Society continued to cooperate with various other Jewish and non-Jewish institutions in Belgrade in their programs and campaigns and to offer regular and emergency aid to needy families and individuals.
In 1924 twenty-four Jewish women’s clubs from various parts of Yugoslavia held a congress in Belgrade to form an Association of Jewish Women’s Societies for the entire kingdom; ten years later this body, which coordinated many of the charitable, educational, and cultural activities of Jewish women, had grown to forty member-clubs. At the forefront of this association was Jelena Demajo; Eliza Feldman, president of the Belgrade Ashkenazi women’s society, Dobrotvor, and Ilka Böhm, president of Sarajevo’s La Humanidad, served as its vice-presidents. Dobrotvor, founded in 1895, had as its principal aim helping the poor, especially the sick and disabled, widows and their families, and impoverished girls preparing for marriage. It offered monthly as well as emergency aid; twice a year, before Passover and before Rosh Ha-Shanah, it distributed food; around Hanukkah it provided winter supplies in the form of fuel and warm clothing. Dobrotvor, like similar associations in other communities, derived its revenues from membership dues, teas, entertainments, and gifts donated in the synagogue, as well as special contributions from benefactors. In Sarajevo during the interwar period, the Sephardi women’s society La Humanidad, which had been established in 1894, operated a day-care center as well as a holiday camp for poor children, in addition to the usual welfare contributions to new mothers, poor brides, orphans, invalids, and girls learning trades; the Sociedad de vizitar dolientes specialized in looking after the elderly and the sick. Until World War II, Sephardi and Ashkenazi women generally maintained separate organizations in Belgrade, Sarajevo and elsewhere.
Although, some Jewish women became actively involved in Croatian and Serbian women’s clubs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, most preferred to join Jewish groups, since nearly all women’s associations in the South Slav lands were denominational. Several Jewish women’s groups developed in the Vojvodina, including the Novi Sad Israelite Charitable Society in 1876. The first Jewish women’s club in Croatia-Slavonia was founded in Vukovar in 1861; the Israelite Women’s Society Jelena Prister began its work in Zagreb in 1887; by 1908, nine more such organizations had come into existence in Croatia. The most ambitious undertaking by Zagreb Jewish women was the Israelite Vacation Colony. Between 1906 and World War I, this group of women sponsored the visits of two hundred and fifty sickly children to the seaside and sixty-three to the mountains; between 1915 and 1922, it helped an additional three hundred enjoy similar vacations. In 1923, thanks to a generous endowment from Mathilda Deutsch-Mačeljski (d.1946), a wealthy philanthropist who served as its president, the Israelite Vacation Colony was able to purchase Villa Antonia, a large home in Crkvenica on the Dalmatian coast. From 1923 to 1939 some two thousand five hundred poor or ailing children, mainly from Zagreb, took advantage of the Israelite Vacation Colony’s sponsorship and spent one month or more on the sunny Adriatic. In 1940 a new mountain home at Ravna Gora in northern Croatia temporarily opened its doors to these children. This organization not only provided services in the summer months; during the school year it supplied bread and milk to needy children attending the Jewish school and occasional help to their parents as well.
In addition to local Jewish women’s clubs in various communities around the country, the European Zionist women’s federation, WIZO (Women’s International Zionist Organization), established its first branch in Zagreb in 1927. By 1940, this organization, headed by Julia König of Zagreb and Reza Steindler of Belgrade, had sixty-seven local chapters in nearly every major Jewish center, with approximately five thousand members. Mirjam Weiller, a WIZO activist, Jewish educator, and writer of children’s stories, organized Zionist girls’ clubs and directed the Jewish kindergarten in Zagreb from 1923 to 1941. Other WIZO members also worked hard to improve the status of women and girls in both Yugoslavia and Palestine. In 1933 WIZO created the Central Jewish Bureau for Productive Aid, which provided Jewish girls and boys with scholarships; ran campaigns to help needy Jewish children in Bitola; and supplied aid to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria. WIZO affiliates participated in all Zionist activities in the country, organizing hakhsharah stations to prepare prospective pioneers for life in Palestine; working to send two hundred and fifty Jewish children on Youth Aliya; and spreading Jewish nationalist culture and information about a future Jewish state. Although most of its members were Ashkenazim, WIZO differed from most other Jewish women’s groups in Yugoslavia by including many Sephardi women within its ranks.
Jewish women do not appear to have played a prominent role within Yugoslav feminist organizations, such as the Alliance of the Women’s Movement, which lobbied for women’s suffrage during the interwar years. However, Paulina Lebl Albala (1891–1967), a translator, literary critic, and professor of literature in Belgrade, helped found the Yugoslav Association of University-Educated Women in 1927 and served as its president for many years. In addition to her efforts to promote the social and professional goals of educated women, Albala, who had grown up in the Belgrade Ashkenazi community and was married to a Zionist leader who was president of the Belgrade Sephardi community, was active in Zionist youth work. Before World War II, the main sphere of involvement for adult Jewish women in Yugoslavia tended to be within the Jewish community rather than
