Two tombstones in the Jewish cemetery overlooking Pristina. (Ron Kampeas/JTA)
On the Sunday evening of the May weekend when a gunman killed four people at a Jewish museum in Brussels and thugs beat two Jews in Paris, thick clouds dappled Pristina’s early summer sky.
Boxing Club Prishtina is closed. Cracks running through walls, it doesn’t look like it’s been open for years. It resembles the shtiebels one encounters in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim quarter: low-slung, pale, hard, built to last. But nothing on it denotes Jewish use; no telltale mezuzot traces, no faded Hebrew inscription.
The Jewish cemetery overlooking Pristina is the city’s one certain Jewish site. In June 2011, students from Dartmouth and the American University in Kosovo restored it. In November of the same year, vandals defaced the tombstones with swastikas and a misspelled German command: “Jud Raus!”— or “Jews out.” Government officials expressed outrage, and within weeks the Ministry of Culture had removed the graffiti.
Distant traffic creates a soothing white noise. Families gather at sunset to enjoy the cemetery’s quiet unfettered view of the city. Its scattered tombstones — elaborately engraved, commemorating the passing of rabbis, community leaders and their wives and children — suggest a rich Jewish life around the beginning of the 20th century.
Up an alley in another corner of downtown Pristina, near Kosovo’s communist-era National Library notoriously resembling a caged brain, is Renaissance, a restaurant only locals know.
Its owner, Ilir Zhubi, in his 60s, long gray hair drawn back, is an institution. You pay 15 euros and eat as much as you want of whatever’s cooking: No menu.
Displayed against a wall separating two of the restaurant’s rooms is a cluster of artifacts: a Shabbat candle holder, a hanukiyah, a Magen David, a pair of kippot.
Jewish ritual objects kept by Ilir Zhubi, whose grandfather was Jewish, in his Pristina restaurant, Renaissance. (Ron Kampeas/JTA)
Asked if he is Jewish, Zhubi tells the story of his grandfather, a policeman in Haifa who around the turn of the previous century made his way from Palestine first to Thessaloniki in Greece and then to Gjakova, a town in western Kosovo, where he married a local woman and settled down.
During World War II, the family changed names to avoid detection by the Nazi occupiers, and what Jewish heritage there was began to dissipate. His first name, Ilir, is a common one of his generation, reflecting a theory popular in the last century that Albanians are descended from the ancient Illyrians.
Zhubi passes around his grandfather’s artifacts. “Hold them,” he says, as if aware of how rare a tangible Jewish artifact is in his country. The candle holder is missing a corner. He listens intently as its Hebrew is translated: “A candle is a commandment, and the Torah is light.”
Sometimes, he says, he wears one of the kippot. If the curious ask, he answers “Shabbat.” Albanians and Jews, he says, are brothers.
He sits his guests down and asks his son to bring over the homemade raki. Zhubi searches for his iPad and calls up a YouTube video recounting the rescue of Jews by Albanians, passing this too among the visitors.
He has one more artifact he wants to show his guests and returns from a back room with a full-size Israeli flag. He carefully unfolds the blue-and-white banner and wraps himself in it.
Where did he get the flag?
“Friends brought it,” he says, “from Jerusalem.”
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