Multi-million-dollar Holocaust museum opens in Macedonia

SKOPJE, Macedonia — The capital of this Balkan nation of 2 million people sees the dedication of a multi-million-dollar Holocaust museum that has been called one of the finest institutions of its kind.

Macedonia, the landlocked country north of Greece, had a Jewish population of about 8,000 before the Holocaust, “and more than 98 percent of them were murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators,” Michael Berenbaum, a former director of the United States Holocaust Museum’s research institute, tells the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

That’s part of the reason that an institution of the magnitude of the new museum, which according to Macedonian media cost $23 million to build, is “appropriate” in Skopje, he says.

The museum, a three-story building located in the Macedonian capital’s museum quarter, includes unique displays such as hundreds of suitcases dangling from the ceiling, a transport wagon similar to ones used to transport the Macedonian Jews to be murdered, and a tank engine of the kind used to produce deadly gas for the gas chamber of Treblinka, where Macedonian Jews were killed.

The funding comes from restitution money paid in 2000 by the government to the local Jewish community, which now comprises about 200 members.

Attending the museum’s opening was Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, Robert Singer, the executive vice president of the World Jewish Congress, and other dignitaries.

— JTA