Obj. ID: 43551
Memorials  Holocaust Memorial in the Jewish Cemetery in Novi Sad, Serbia, 1952

To the main object: Jewish cemetery in Novi Sad, Serbia

Novi Sad, also known as Újvidék in Hungarian and Neusatz in German, is the capital of the Serbian autonomous province of Vojvodina.

On the eve of  World War II, the city had approximately 61,000 residents. Its population was eminently heterogeneous. While Serbs, Hungarians, and Germans were the main ethnic groups, more than twenty ethnic minorities resided in the city. Jews numbered up to 4,000. Between 1941 and 1944, during World War II, Vojvodina was divided between Nazi Germany and its allies, Hungary and the Independent State of Croatia. Novi Sad that time located in the Bačka district of northern Serbia was annexed by Hungary. Upon the invasion, Hungarian forces began terrorizing the Jewish and Serb residents. During the January 1942 massacres in Novi Sad and its environs (Raid in southern Bačka), Hungarian police killed at least 800 Jews in the city and 400 in its environs. The rest of the Jews of Novi-Sad, around 1,600 people, were deported to Auschwitz with the rest of the Hungarian Jews. [Hungarian policemen...]

The history of the monument started in 1947 when the Jewish Community of Novi Sad organized a competition and awarded three prizes for the design of the memorial. The sculptor Dejan Bešlin received the third prize, however, his design was chosen in the end for construction. The monument was dedicated on September 1, 1952.

The inauguration of this monument was part of a larger action by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia to unveil central monuments to the victims in Sarajevo, Belgrade, Zagreb, Novi Sad, and Đakovo in September and October 1952. The unveiling ceremony was attended by Yugoslav state and Communist Party officials and Israeli and U. S. Jewish delegates. The event was fully covered by the mass media and well-documented in a series of photographs taken during the inauguration ceremony (currently in the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade).

Emil Kerenji wrote about the messages that these monuments conveyed:

The dedication ceremonies and the monuments themselves reflected the dual goals of the [Jewish] Federation—the commemoration of specifically Jewish victims of the war in the context of confirmation of the officially revered legacies of the “struggle for national liberation” (narodnooslobodilačka borba) and “brotherhood and unity” (bratstvojedinstvo). Monuments were thus meant to commemorate both the “Jewish victims of Fascism” and “Jewish fallen fighters,” in accordance with the ritual mode of commemoration of World War II that was being established in Yugoslavia at the time [...].

The monuments did, however, feature Jewish motifs that were immediately recognizable to Jews, and that invoked cultural connotations that were of an entirely different order than those provided by the discourses of “victims of Fascism” and “fallen fighters.” [...] The monuments thus simultaneously conveyed two different cultural contexts—one compatible with the reigning ideological mode of commemoration of World War II, fully and literally translatable into Hebrew, the language of the new Jewish culture; and one more elusive, and accessible only to those familiar with Jewish culture and tradition.

One important caveat regarding the monuments in Yugoslavia ... is that they were located in the Jewish cemeteries. They were thus removed from the full view of the general Yugoslav public. They were located at the periphery. Monuments to general, unnamed “victims of Fascism” and “fallen fighters” were being built across Yugoslavia, in central locations in cities, towns, and villages. Monuments to Jewish victims, however, because they commemorated a specific ethnic group, could not vie for those locations. But since their primary importance for the Jewish communities in Yugoslavia lay in their potential to rally the remaining Jews in the country around a new basis for Jewish identification, their placement at Jewish cemeteries was not a drawback; on the contrary, ritual commemorations that developed over the years around these monuments only confirmed their Jewish character. 

The dedication ceremonies, however, contrary to the later annual commemorations, were very visible to the general Yugoslav public. They were widely covered by the press across Yugoslavia. The numerous articles stressed: [...] Jews finally felt free and equal in the new Yugoslavia, in which the national question was solved; numerous international Jewish delegations in attendance testified to this fact, as did the presence of state representatives and the general public at the ceremonies.

[Kerenji, 2008, pp. 211-216]

The monument is the meeting ground on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27.

The monument is easily accessible and located at the very entrance to the cemetery, right in front of the cemetery chapel (Beit Tahara).