Crossroads to comeback: Croatia’s Osijek leads minor Balkan Jewish cultural revival

The audience, a majority of whom were not Jewish, engaged with the singer’s storytelling and singing, turning the concert into a participatory affair and a successful opening to the city’s Jewish Culture Month.

“It was very different from traditional concerts, especially classical ones, because Nani established a direct, very warm and personal contact with the audience,” says concertgoer Vesna Brezovac. “The concert was warm and relaxed in atmosphere, yet it was very serious in quality – the music and performance (playing and singing) were really world-class.”

Regarding the renewed interest in Ladino music, Vazana believes it speaks to a deeper desire of the younger generation to get in touch with their own roots, whatever they might be.

“There is a new generation that is interested in their heritage, and they want to do more. They want to experience it,” says Vazana. “I think I started doing this in 2016, and there were only old people at my shows. And now it’s between 25% and 50% younger people.

“People who come to me after the shows who aren’t necessarily Jewish say, hey, your story about rediscovering your roots inspired me to go ask my grandmother questions because she also speaks in a dialect that nobody knows anything about. And they are not Jewish, and they don’t speak Ladino.”

This could be a way to sum up the push for revived Jewish cultural expression in this corner of the former Yugoslavia – Jewish culture flourishing without many Jews.

This past month the Jewish community in Osijek hosted a whole slew of Jewish cultural activities for both the local Jewish and non-Jewish population.

“At least if we speak about Osijek, I can say that every event that is hosted by the Jewish community (and there are many throughout the month and the year) is well received,” says Julijana Mladenovska-Tešija, a vice-dean and lecturer in philosophy and ethics at the Evangelical Theological Seminary of Osijek, who also delivered a lecture during Jewish Culture Month. “There is an audience that gladly enjoys the music, art, film, history, creativity, and wisdom of the Jewish nation presented at the events.”

“Slavonia, and Osijek in particular, are at the crossroads of faiths and cultures, with many minorities living here for centuries,” continues Mladenovska-Tešija. “In this setting it is normal to come together and learn from each other.”

The two primary reasons for the Jewish cultural revival? The renewed importance of ethnic identities in the post-Communist period, and the restitution of Jewish communal property lost during the Holocaust to some communities and the use of the funds received from this property to finance cultural activities.

While the Jewish communities of the former Yugoslavia will almost certainly never return to their pre-Holocaust heyday in terms of numbers or cultural output, after the quiet years of Communist rule and the difficult period during, and in the aftermath of, wars that accompanied the dissolution of Yugoslavia, this minor revival in local Jewish culture is a welcome development.

Osijek was once a flowering Jewish cultural center in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At its peak it numbered 3,000 members. The community even sent a speaker to the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897.

After the First Zionist Congress and before World War I, regional Zionist congresses were convened in the South Slav lands of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Osijek was twice the location of these meetings, in 1904 and 1906, the only city to twice serve in that role. These gatherings brought together Jews with Zionist sympathies across the “South Slav lands” under Habsburg dominion, primarily Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, leading to the founding of a regional Zionist association.

One of the main driving forces for Zionist activity in Osijek during this period was a wave of young, Jewish professionals who were university educated in Vienna around the turn of the century and came back to Osijek and elsewhere in the region with the idea of Zionism.

Like many Central European Jewish families, Osijek’s Jews progressed from petty merchants to industrialists within generations. Their sons studied in Vienna, the nearest university offering subjects like medicine, around the turn of the century, precisely when Zionist student societies were flourishing there.

“Only several young men [from Osijek] studied in Budapest and other cities like Bremen and Munich,” says Croatian historian Ljiljana Dobrovšak. “Most came to Vienna. Vienna at that time was a cradle of Zionism, with Herzl and others, and the sons of the Jewish families from Osijek took these ideas and brought them back to the Jewish community in Osijek.”

The Jewish community in Osijek at this time was predominantly Neolog, a modernist form of Judaism popular with middle- and upper-class assimilated Jews in Hungary. Like elsewhere in Europe, this combination of young, emancipated and rapidly assimilating Jews who had left the strictures of traditional Orthodoxy but still wanted a connection to their historical and ethnic roots fostered the spread of Zionism.

“In Croatia, the idea of a Zionist movement was about going back to the Jewish origins, to Jewish culture of the participants,” says Dobrovšak. “Because at the end of the 19th century, you could recognize a Jewish family only because they went to the synagogue and because there was a family register for the Jewish matrimonial books. But differences in outside languages, meals, and habits did not exist.

She continues, “There was a very tiny line between who was German and who was Jewish. And lots of Jews didn’t know Hebrew. They spoke German, Hungarian, or Croatian.”

As a result, Zionism at the end of the 19th century started with a focus on teaching the Jewish people, especially the Jewish youth, about Jewish history and how they must preserve it. The idea at that time was to go back to the roots.

In the Croatian Jewish community, after the foundation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1918 and well up to the Second World War, Zionism remained primarily a cultural phenomenon and less focused on the actual settlement of the Land of Israel. There were the annual donations to the Jewish National Fund, but very little immigration to the Land of Israel.

“You know, it was almost a joke. You’d contribute money to the halutzim in Palestine, and you’d stay here in [Croatia],” says Ivo Goldstein, a historian of Croatian Jewish history and former Croatian ambassador to UNESCO. “Out of the 25,000 Jews who were living in Croatia before World War II, only 200 made aliyah before the war. Not more.”

Osijek’s Jewish community after the war, like many Jewish communities in what became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, was decimated. An estimated 80% of Croatia’s prewar Jewish population of 25,000 did not survive the Holocaust. Of those who did survive, approximately half made aliyah to Israel in the years immediately following the war, after the Jewish Yugoslav Communist Mosa Pijade interceded with Yugoslav leader Tito to let Zionist Jews leave for Israel.

Today, the affiliated members of Osijek’s Jewish community number no more than 150 people, according to community president Damir Lajoš. However, Osijek’s location in a border region and the community’s access to greater resources due to restituted communal property has allowed it to play a hub role among Jewish communities in the region.

“After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Jewish communities in the newly formed countries continued their cooperation, partly out of necessity, as the Jewish communities in these countries were so small they faced assimilation and extinction,” says Lajoš. “In order to preserve Jewish life and culture, smaller communities started to cooperate. A network of communities from the small Jewish communities in Vojvodina region of Serbia, the Slavonia region of Croatia and northern Bosnia was created that was so successful in gathering Jews from the region that communities deemed bigger and further away started to join.

“Osijek became one of the hubs of activities, spearheading what were originally Days of Jewish Culture in Croatia, and starting gatherings of small communities for major holidays and the like.”

“For now, our activities stopped the decline in the number of community members,” adds Lajoš. “There is growth for the first time since World War Two. It’s still within the margins of statistical error, but we are hopeful.”

In 2025, Osijek’s Jewish community regularly cooperated on cultural activities with Jewish communities from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Osijek Jewish community also has extensive ties with local NGOs and cultural institutions thanks to the work it has done on promoting local Jewish culture. While the community must overcome the obstacles created by a small number of members, pressure from mixed marriages and limited funding, it has found a way to make an impact.

“Faced with slow assimilation, we tried something, and for now at least it’s working,” says community president Lajoš. “We turned to culture. Our reasoning was: what’s the use of preserving sites, monuments and buildings if we lose people?”

The Osijek Jewish community invested effort in organizing joint celebrations of all major holidays, commemorations and other cultural events. When Osijek’s Jewish leadership saw that it had the attention of all the communities in the broader region, it decided to start the Month of Jewish Culture instead of just specific days.

“We started small events within community premises like book presentations, lectures, etc., all with free entrance,” says Lajoš. “Having guests from other neighboring countries, we attracted the attention of other cultural institutions and people in the City of Osijek. Soon we offered our events to other institutions, and they were interested. Now we cooperate with the majority of cultural and other institutions, NGOs, schools, and others in the City of Osijek.”

According to Lajoš, the Osijek Jewish community has very good ties with the Jewish communities of northern Serbia, particularly the Vojvodina region, both due to their proximity and due to historical reasons.

“There are a lot of small [Jewish] communities in that part of Serbia,” says Lajoš. “So we kind of made an agreement. Everybody celebrates something. So we receive them on that date. Then we go to Novi Sad for another holiday. Sometimes we go to Subotica for Hanukkah. Then we go to Zrenjanin for a kind of Maccabiah for the elderly, etc.”

This year, the Jewish Culture Month received funding from the regional authorities – Osijek-Baranja County and Croatia’s State Council for Minorities. However, the majority of the costs are still borne by the Osijek Jewish community. In the past years, the Jewish Culture Month received help from the Embassy of Israel, Embassy of Poland, City of Osijek, and others.

The portion of the funding for Jewish events that is provided by the local community is derived largely from inherited communal property that is rented out, and the income is divided between helping poor Jewish families and funding cultural events.

The biggest center of Jews in Croatia is the capital, Zagreb. Today, there are three synagogues there, but attendances are small.

A large share of Jewish cultural activities in the capital is managed by the Jewish Community of Zagreb. This organization has been involved in restitution efforts for Jewish communal and heirless property from the Holocaust era.

However, according to the World Jewish Restitution Organization, only a small percentage of pre-Holocaust Jewish property in Croatia has been recovered. The crux of the problem is a 1996 restitution law that only allowed restitution or compensation for property taken under Yugoslav Communist rule. Individual court cases have proceeded to return some of the property confiscated by fascist authorities from Jews. Yet, according to expert Nadia-Mihal Brandl, quoted in a Deutsche Welle article published last year, in Zagreb alone the value of once Jewish-owned real estate that has not been returned exceeded $300 million as of 2022.

Efforts are being made to revive Jewish culture and cultural institutions elsewhere in the Balkans as well.

For example, in North Macedonia, the Holocaust Memorial Center museum was opened in 2011, and unveiled its first permanent exhibition in 2018, depicting Jewish life in the country from Roman times to the present day. The multimillion-dollar museum in the capital of Skopje was funded with the proceeds from heirless Jewish property restituted to the local Jewish community based on a 2002 law. All told, the North Macedonian Jewish community had received an estimated $25.6m. by the time of last payment in 2018.

Meanwhile, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Serbia, known by its Serbian acronym Savez JOS, receives €950,000 a year in funding from the Serbian government as part of a 2016 law. In addition, heirless Jewish property confiscated during the Holocaust was returned to local Jewish communities under the same law.

Some 20% of government funds received by the federation are paid to Holocaust survivors, while the remainder is used for research, education and cultural activities.

Unfortunately, the potential income local Serbian Jewish communities could receive from the heirless Jewish properties they received is being tied up in court cases with alleged heirs. This precludes use of the income from such properties to fund communal activities, cultural and otherwise.

Among the significant pre-World War II Jewish communities, the main laggard has been the one in Bosnia and Herzegovina, centered on the Sarajevo community. Well known for its possession of the Sarajevo Haggadah that originated in 14th-century Spain, the community has not seen the restitution of its prewar communal and heirless property mandated by law. Instead, in August, the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina decided to donate the income from the sale of the publication of The Sarajevo Haggadah – History and Art, as well as the revenue from tickets to see the Sarajevo Haggadah, “to Palestine,” provoking outrage from Jewish groups worldwide.

Despite the return and growth of Jewish cultural activities and institutions across the region, there is still a lot of pessimism regarding the demographic continuity of the Jewish communities of the former Yugoslavia.

“Membership in Jewish communities, both in Croatia and in the former Yugoslavia, has been in constant overall decline,” says Goldstein. “The main reasons are low birth rates, assimilation (partly due to mixed marriages), and emigration.”

The success of Osijek’s Jewish Culture Month is a shining example of the room for renewed Jewish cultural expression and institutions in the Balkans. For the time being, it is being supported by the financial legacy of a once much larger and more prosperous community that existed before the Holocaust. Time will tell if this minor revival in Jewish culture can sustain itself amid the demographic pressure faced by the small Jewish communities of the wider region.