“Farewell Beloved”: The Holocaust in Ladino Music

Little is taught in America about the Balkan Jewish experience of the Holocaust. Consequently, the resulting music is scarcely researched. It paints an authentic picture of music-making as a practice in the Sephardic cultural response to mass trauma and as an exercise of memorialization of those that had been rendered voiceless. The following songs are representative of the Ladino corpus that made its way to America through refugees and advocates. Here, Simone Salmon builds the history of the ways in which Hitler’s Final Solution transpired in the Balkans, providing context and evidence that there was no singular experience shared by the majority of Balkan Jews.

Judy Frankel, a singer, guitarist, and songwriter from Part 1, composed the following melody in 1992 for a poem that she collected from Jennie Adatto Tarabulus. Jennie’s husband, David Tarabulus, wrote it for the documentary titled “The Greek Jews of the Holocaust.” He had moved from Turkey to Xanthi, Greece with his family as a child. He was working in Baghdad when his Greek family was deported to the death camps. ^[1]

In 1941, Germany gave Bulgaria the regions of Western Thrace, Vardar-Macedonia and the Morava Valley, in exchange for passage through Bulgaria to Romania. Although there were no German troops in Bulgaria in 1942, Bulgaria was pressured by the Germans to speed up its persecution of Jews. In response, Bulgaria targeted the stateless Jews of Thrace and Macedonia, sparing the lives of those who had belonged to Bulgaria before the expansion. ^[4] Frankel's version of the song "Arboles Yoran por Luvias", like "Adiyo Kerida", was originally written about a romance, but contains additional lyrics linking it to the Holocaust. An earlier version of the song by Dr Avram Sadikario, recorded in Skopje by Susana Weich-Shahak, can be found in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Sephardic Communities and the Holocaust collection.

Frankel’s version has evidently been combined with what Isaac Jack Levy published under “En tierras de Polonia,” ^[7] today known as “En tierras ajenas,” a poem that contains pronunciations consistent with Jews of this region and the Jews of Edirne, Turkey. ^[8] It is rumoured that this song was spontaneously sung by Greek Jews lined up for the gas chambers, but there is little evidence of this.

While Turkey remained neutral for most of the Second World War, the state also imposed anti-Jewish legislation which included the denaturalization of Jews living abroad and the refusal to repatriate them, even under the suggestion of Nazi Germany. ^[9] The result was thousands of Turkish Jews being sent to their deaths at Sobibor and Auschwitz while the country was simultaneously offering Jewish refugees short transit visas, allowing them to pass from Turkey through to Mandatory Palestine. The visas managed to save hundreds of lives during the war. Despite that, the Struma disaster, an incident of prolonged Turkish negligence that led to the sinking of a ship carrying Romanian Jewish refugees en route to Mandatory Palestine, underscored the humiliation of Jews across the continent of Europe and remains a major source of Turkish Jewish resentment to this day. Once it was certain that Germany was losing, Turkey declared war against Germany in 1945 to become an early member of the United Nations. As a result of Turkey’s reluctance to work with the Nazis, there remains a (albeit, waning) Jewish population today. The following song was composed by Selim Hubeş, a member of the Istanbul Ladino band Los Paşaros Sefaradis. For his lyrics, Hubeş adapted a poem of Avner Perez written for the Jews of Thessaloniki. Despite its (mostly) major mode, the lyrics tell the story of a woman mourning her fiancé who died in the gas chambers. 

After interviews with several members of Los Paşaros Sefaradis, Simone Salmon added the song to the repertoire of Kantigas Muestras, a Ladino singing ensemble that she directs in Los Angeles. A simplified version of the song was last performed at UCLA in 2018. Regrettably, Salmon was unable to play the recording to its composer, Hubeş, before he died in 2021.

While additional Balkan Ladino songs depicting the Holocaust are spread across several archives, the selection of the most popular commercially recorded songs included here have had the greatest influence on global Sephardic society. Many more poems and songs have been recorded and can be found in books such as Isaac Jack Levy’s And the World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust.

Balkan Jewish experiences of the Holocaust varied greatly among Sephardim and differed depending on time, place, local leadership, and other factors. The above history teaches us that there was no singular experience shared by the majority of Balkan Jews as it demonstrates the unreliability of the category as a whole. ^[11] Because there is little Sephardic art music about the Holocaust, much of it uses folk or popular melodies which have garnered the genre minimal popularity in the musicological sphere. The hope is to help this music gain legitimacy in the field as historical, cultural, and musical artefact.

Simone Salmon, Feb 2025

Notes

1. Frankel, Judy. 2001. Sephardic Songs in Judeo-Spanish: From the Notebooks of Judy Frankel. Owing Mills, MD: Tara Publications. 75.
2. Ibid.
3. I have slightly modified the translation that was published by Judy Frankel.
4. However, Bulgaria selectively implemented and enforced these laws.
5. Ibid. 68.
6. Ibid.
7. Levy, Isaac Jack, ed. 1989. And the World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 212-213.
8. There were few Jews from Edirne that
9. Some Turkish diplomats disregarded these instructions.
10. Translation is my own.
11. For example, see Todorova, Maria. 2009. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.