Introduction
Introduction
This book is not a comprehensive history of Albania or even a comprehensive history of the Jews of Albania. The primary objective in writing this book is to call attention to the wonderful response of the peo le of Albania when foreign and Albanian Jews sought shelter from the Holocaust. The delay in telling the story of the rescue is due to the isolationist dictatorship that ruled Albania from the end of the Second World War until the early 1990s.
Albania is the only country in occupied Europe where Jews were not victims of the Nazi killing machine.¹ To understand the rescue of the Jews it is necessary to understand the general history of the Jews in Albania and a general view of Albania’s history. Hopefully readers will find this very generalized history as fascinating as did the author.
Before becoming involved with the Albanian “Righteous Gentiles”(2) my only knowledge of Albania was the note that, at one time, my passport was not usable in 4 countries, Albania being one of the four. I was to learn that Albania is the poorest country in Europe and the only one with a Moslem majority. Moslems constitute about 70% of Albania’s population and they sheltered Jews no less than did the Christians.
I was also to team the wonderful fact that Albania was the one occupied country that evaded the Nazi persecution of Jews and had the unique survival rate of 100%. It was the only occupied country to have a larger Jewish population after the Second World War than before.
An American Jew, Herman Bernstein, while serving as the American Ambassador to Albania in the 1930s called this the most non anti-Semitic community in the world.
A second reason for writing this book is to call attention to the heroic efforts of the late Josef Jakoel(3) and his daughter, Felicita, in arranging the emigration of nearly all Albanian Jews to Israel in 1991. Josef Jakoel lived long enough to see the exodus to Israel and spent his last months of life in Eretz Israel, the land of Israel. He truly was a second Moses leading his people to their promised land.
From 1967 through the end of 1990 Albania was an atheistic state and a closed society, so closed, that it was a crime to read foreign literature, and so atheistic that it was a crime to give a child a Biblical name. The changes away from the closed and atheistic society occurred at about the time the Albanian Jews emigrated to Israel.
Jakoel characterized the Albanian Jews as “Romaniots” descendants of an ancient Jewish culture. There is very little in the Jewish encyclopedia about Romaniots, much of which is wrong, according to Jakoel. The Romaniots have some unique customs, but there is no question that they are Jews.
The population figures for time and place are easily confused by the sources as well as by myself. The problem is that we are dealing with estimates, and they are often conflicting. All population figures should be understood as estimates, and it’s more important to understand the events and deeds than to be concerned with exact numbers.
And finally, I admit to a great confusion about Albanian names, both personal and place names, and apologize in advance to anyone whose name appears in the wrong time and place or is misspelled. With the assistance of Albanian speaking friends I have attempted to keep these errors to a minimum, but…
Harvey Sarner
Palm Springs, California
Footnotes:
1. The Jewish family Ardet was killed by the Nazis but were arrested as the family of a partisan and not as Jews.
2. The term “Righteous Gentile” applies to persons determined to have risked their lives to shelter Jews during the Holocaust.
3. Josef Rafael Jakoel was born in Vlora, Albania, in 1922 and was educated at the Italian Technical Institute of Commerce and graduated from Tirana State
University. For the last ten years of his career he was a lecturer on accounting in the Higher Institute of Agriculture in Tirana. Much that has been written is based on letters and conversations with Josef Jakoel.