In Muslim Kosovo, Jewish remnant stakes claim to nation’s past and future

Demiri, the Kosovo Jewish community president, steps outside the interfaith conference and the Theranda Hotel, named for the Roman settlement that lies beneath Prizren, for a smoke. He strolls toward the sidewalk with an easy gait that along with a thick head of hair and ready grin belies his 67 years.

He never gets far: Everyone knows his name, and his progression is staggered by a series of Balkan male shoulder-to-shoulder hugs. Greetings are exchanged in the three local languages — Albanian, Serbian and Turkish.

Demiri is a known quantity in Prizren, the country’s second-largest city, where all but a handful of Kosovo’s 56 Jews live. He directed its textile factory, the biggest in Yugoslavia, during the good times and kept 3,000 people working. He was a minister in Kosovo’s provincial government in the 1980s and Yugoslavia’s trade representative in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s.

Times are no longer so good, and he is retired, living in a house with his three adult children, a daughter-in-law and a grandchild. The adults are professionals, but it’s hard to make ends meet with wages averaging $400 a month for the professional class.

Since 2002, when Demiri became president of the Jewish community, which today consists of two extended families, his mission has been to sustain the community into the new age of Kosovar independence.

“It’s respect for Jews who have lived here since the Inquisition,” he says, explaining what he expects from Kosovo’s government. “One must do this. It was a grand community. It’s our right, for our parents.”

Last year he demanded official recognition of the community from the government officials who had asked him to speak at the first Interfaith Kosovo conference to prove Kosovo’s affection for its Jewish heritage. He got it immediately.

Is there a future for Jews in independent Kosovo?

“Of course,” he says. “If I didn’t think there was a future, I would go to Israel.”

But one of his daughters, Teuta, a bank worker, is not as optimistic. She immigrated to Israel in 2003 when she was 18, but stayed just a year; she missed her family.

Now Teuta is 29 and wants to go back to Israel and to start a Jewish family. This time she wants her siblings and father to come with her.

“There is no future here,” Teuta Demiri says. “There is lots of unemployment; it’s hard to live here.”

In a less guarded moment, her father acknowledges as much.

“One must have stoicism to be a Jew here,” Demiri says. “In Israel it is easy to be a Jew. Israel charges your Jewish batteries.”

He isn’t so specific on what he wants to see in the new Kosovo: New synagogues? A school? A community center? The country has none of these. For the High Holidays, some Kosovar Jews travel to the Macedonian capital of Skopje or the Serbian capital of Belgrade.

Demiri is seeking the restitution for the properties lost during the Holocaust and then through the years of communist rule.

But what are these properties? Documentation is more or less nonexistent. Details are consigned to the community’s memory or, more precisely, Votim Demiri’s head.

The story of the disappearance of traces of a once vibrant community is not an uncommon one in 20th-century Europe, peeled away first by the Holocaust and then by communism.

Jews in Kosovo were imprisoned during the Italian occupation, but for the most part not deported. After the Italians surrendered to the Allies in 1943, the Nazis deported 400 Jews from Kosovo. Fewer than a hundred, including Votim Demiri’s mother and aunts, who had been deported to Bergen-Belsen, returned. They joined several hundred Jews who had hidden among ethnic Albanians. In 1948, his aunts left for Israel; his mother married an ethnic Albanian partisan.

Then came the communist years, when religion was repressed. Among many other houses of worship, Pristina’s two synagogues were destroyed in the early 1960s.

Until the 1998-99 war, Kosovo’s Jewish community had numbered about 300 or so, but many were Serbian-speaking Jews more closely allied with Serbia. In 1999, men claiming to represent the Albanian separatist Kosovo Liberation Army told the then-president of the Jewish community that he must leave.

Speaking to the Demiris, one gets the impression that relations between what’s left of the Kosovo community and its expats in Belgrade fall somewhere between fraught and affectionate. Each side also questions why the other made its choice, to leave or to stay.

When the Serbian-allied Jews fled, one of them took to Belgrade the records of the Kosovo community. He has since died, Ines Demiri says, and the Jews in Belgrade insist they don’t know where the records are.

“We lack information,” Ines Demiri says. “We lack historical facts.”

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