Sephardic Jewish music of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia and present-day Greece

The historiography of the Holocaust rarely mentions Sephardic Jews, and there is a paucity of documentation of Ladino music when compared to that of Yiddish, German, and Polish songs resulting from the Jewish experience. While there are many Yiddish songs that depict the Jewish experience of the Holocaust, there are just a handful of Sephardic songs written in Ladino that do the same by Sephardic Jews living in the United States. The songs presented here are not the only examples of Ladino music associated with the Holocaust; rather, these songs were commercially performed, recorded and/or produced in America. The melodies, themes and vocabularies were familiar to survivors, providing a connection after the experience of such overwhelming tragedy. To contextualize these songs, a brief history of the ways in which Hitler's Final Solution transpired in the Balkans has been provided. The first part comprises music from Yugoslavia and Greece, while the second part features music from Greece and Turkey.

Yugoslavia and Greece were not signatories to the 1939 Italian-German Pact of Steel, which promised mutual assistance. Consequently, these countries were invaded by Germany in 1941. During the brutal occupation of Yugoslavia, attacks on Jews, Roma/Sinti, Communists, liberals, and anti-German nationalists were rampant, so much so that Serbia became "Judenrein" (a term denoting a state in which the Jews have been eradicated) very early in the unfolding of Hitler's Final Solution. Yugoslavia was divided into two parts: the northern half was occupied by Germany and the southern half was annexed by Italy.

The renowned Sephardic musician Flory Jagoda (1921-2021) was born Flora Papo to a Jewish family that had migrated to Sarajevo from Turkey.^[1] In 1941 at just sixteen years-of-age, her Croatian stepfather provided her with fraudulent documentation and put her on a train from Zagreb to Split, a city in the southern half of Croatia that was a separate Catholic state gifted to Italy by Germany.

During the journey, Jagoda played her accordion^[2] continuously in order to avoid having her papers questioned. After her mother and stepfather joined her four days later, the family was moved by the Italians to the Croatian island of Korčula for internment^[3]. Jagoda remained in Korčula until 1943, when Italy had capitulated to the Germans, causing Croatia to become a German puppet state occupied by both powers. Jagoda and her family boarded a fisherman's tugboat, which conveyed them across the Adriatic to the Italian town of Bari, where they were welcomed as refugees. It was during her employment there that she met the American soldier who later became her husband, and she subsequently moved with him to the United States.

She has since been celebrated as a National Heritage Fellow. Initially proficient in playing the accordion, she transitioned to the guitar, adopting an American style to appeal to a younger American audience. Her rendition of the song "Adiyo Kerida" (1989) is a notable example of this shift in style. In her songbook, Jagoda wrote, "Modern interpretations of this song have changed it from what I remember from the 1940s, when this was the most loved song in Balkan countries, the hottest tango in town. It has classical attributes as well, since Giuseppe Verdi incorporated it into his La Traviata. We Sephardim feel that he borrowed the melody from us, although he did change the rhythm." The melody in question had in fact been derived from Verdi's aria "Addio del passato," which was rendered Jewish through the incorporation of Jewish lyrics.

The same song is used in many depictions of the Greek experience of the Holocaust including the Greek film Cloudy Sunday (originally Ουζερί Τσιτσάνης meaning “Tsitsanis’s Pub”) [6] about the experience of Greeks in Thessaloniki at the time of German occupation.^[7]

In Thessaloniki (known to Sephardim as "Salonica"), the Germans embarked on an enormous campaign of seizing schools, institutions, cultural centres, synagogues and stealing their libraries. They managed to create a humanitarian disaster in Greece, stealing vegetables, mineral resources and fish, even as fishermen pulled their nets from the sea. This disaster affected Jew and gentile alike. Jewish citizens suffered a devastating social death: marked with yellow stars, expelled from their jobs, and robbed of their property through forced Aryanisation. Most Jews in northern Greece were under direct German control. Communities pleaded with the Greek authorities and tried to bribe them (the Salonica community actually succeeded in getting Germany to release 7000 Greek workers in 1942).

The chief rabbi of Thessaloniki tried to persuade the Jews to submit to the German plan because he thought it was the best course of action. In 1943, Salonica was the first city to be sent en masse to the death camps. 50,000 Jews were put on trains to Auschwitz, where they were either gassed or subjected to medical experiments on arrival. Meanwhile, in Greece, there was an attack on the Jewish cemetery of Salonica, the largest Jewish cemetery in all of Europe. The cemetery was raised and gravestones were used to pave streets, make steps for houses, in swimming pools and in the construction of Greek Orthodox churches throughout the city and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki on the site of the cemetery itself. Fewer than 2000 Greek Jews survived the war. Zamboni, an Italian diplomatic consul appointed in Salonika in 1942, smuggled some 250-300 Jews to Milan on temporary passports. Greek Jews suffered the highest death rate of any national group of Jews in Europe during the Second World War. Approximately 90% of the Jews in Greece were killed, with the Jews of Thessaloniki and the entire region of Macedonia suffering a death rate of 98%.

The island of Rhodes was under Italian control from the First World War until Germany occupied the island in 1943. Jews who were not Turkish citizens were imprisoned in Haidary and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. These were the last German deportations from Greece. 

Judy Frankel (1942-2008), a collector and performer of Ladino music, learned this setting of the "Hatikvah" melody from Maurice Levi, Sara Levi, Renée Levi, Stella Levi,^[8] and Selma Mizrahi.^[9] The melody of "Hatikvah" originally came from a madrigal by the 17th century Italian tenor Giuseppe Cenci (Giuseppino de Biado). It became famous throughout Renaissance Europe and was adapted from its Romanian variant by Samuel Cohen, a 19th century Moldavian settler in Ottoman Palestine, who set the melody to the Hebrew poem by Naftali Herz Imber. The lyrics of "Fiestaremos" parallel those of "Hatikvah", reflecting the Zionist sentiments of many Holocaust survivors:^[10]

Despite its celebratory title, “Fiestaremos” proves tranquil and somber in its lyrics and musical treatment.  Like Flory Jagoda’s “Adiyo Kerida,” “Fiestaremos” demonstrates the ways in which Jewish melodies and songs were lifted from their original Italian settings, changing the ways in which they were understood by local communities for the purpose of commemorating the Sephardic experience of the Holocaust in the Balkans.

Part 2 of the Balkan Holocaust series continues with songs reflecting the Sephardic experience of the Holocaust in Greece, Bulgarian Macedonia, and Turkey.

Simone Salmon, Feb 2025

Sources

1.    2002. “Flory Jagoda.” National Endowment for the Arts. https://www.arts.gov/honors/heritage/flory-jagoda

2.      Accordions were called “harmonicas” because of their button system. Her accordion was made by Hohner, a famous harmonica manufacturer.

3.    Jagoda, Flory. 1993. The Flory Jagoda Songbook: Memories of Sarajevo. Owing Mills, MD: Tara Publications. 14. Had Italy not protected them, they would have been moved to a German concentration camp in the north.

4.    Ibid. 35.

5.    Ibid. I modified the last line of this translation from her songbook.

6.    Cloudy Sunday can be viewed on Kanopy, a streaming service provided to those that own a library card in the USA and Canada.

7.    The English title of the movie comes from a song by the same name (“Συννεφιασμένη Κυριακή” or “Synefiazmeni Kyriaki”) composed by Vasilis Tsitsanis about the German occupation of Thessaloniki. The film follows the story of this famous Rebetiko musician and several Jewish and Christian characters during the war.

8.    Frankel, Judy. 2001. Sephardic Songs in Judeo-Spanish: From the Notebooks of Judy Frankel. Owing Mills, MD: Tara Publications. 77.

9.    Ibid. 27.

10.  Much post-Holocaust music contained reference to “Hatikvah.” For more examples, see Werb, Bret. 2014. “‘Vu ahin zol ikh geyn?’: Music Culture of Jewish Displaced Persons” in Dislocated Memories. Fraühauf, Tina and Lily E. Hirsch, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 75-96.

11.  Frankel, Judy. 2001. 77.