Emigration of Jews from Yugoslavia to Israel (1948-1952)

The book by Milan Radovanović, PhD “Emigration of Jews from Yugoslavia to Israel (1948-1952)” will be presented by Milan Ristović, PhD, professor at the Department of History of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade and reviewer of the monograph, Dejan Ristić, PhD, director of the Genocide Victims’ Museum in Belgrade and publisher, as well as the author himself.

The book “Emigration of Jews from Yugoslavia to Israel (1948-1952)” was created as a doctoral thesis of Milan Radovanović, PhD, which was defended at the History Department of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade. The post-war history of the surviving members of the Jewish people in European countries, their attitude towards them, their attempt to re-enter the lives of the countries they considered their own – regardless of the bitter experiences in the past, including the most brutal ones caused by fascism and racist ideology – were mixed with everything with a more pronounced desire to tie their life perspective to the creation of an independent Jewish state in the areas where it existed until the destruction of the Jersualim Temple almost two thousand years ago. This was also a peculiar, by no means easy and simple search for a new identity, facing the new political, social, and every other reality of his old homeland and the legacy of the politics of the great powers in the Middle East, problems caused by new ideological divisions in the post-Cold War world, in search of a new life.

Yugoslav Jews, survivors of the Holocaust, participants in the resistance movement, only slightly more than 10% of the pre-war number of members of the Jewish community, were also part of this process, faced with dilemmas: to stay and participate in the reconstruction of the country under a new ideological system, or to opt for emigration.