Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Kosovo May Build Synagogue or Center for Jewish Community

PRISTINA — The Jewish community of Kosovo is in discussions with the country’s authorities to establish a synagogue or Jewish community center.

Jewish community representatives have recently held discussions with the government and with municipal authorities in Pristina, the Balkan country’s capital and largest city, and in Prizren, the historical town where much of the country’s tiny Jewish community of 56 is concentrated.

Ines Demiri, a foreign ministry official who is also the daughter of Votim Demiri, the Jewish community’s president, told JTA last week that the Jewish community favors a community center in Prizren, modeled on the Holocaust memorial in Skopje, in neighboring Macedonia. Pristina’s mayor earlier this year embraced the idea of a synagogue in his city.

That memorial features an accounting of the destruction of the Macedonian Jewish community during the Holocaust, but also is a memorial of the community when it was thriving. It serves as a gathering place for community events and for holidays for the extant community.

Of Kosovo’s Jewish community of 551 before World War II, 220 are estimated to have been murdered by the Nazis. Its synagogues and Jewish institutions were destroyed during Yugoslavia’s communist period.

Kosovo, formerly a region of Serbia, is a majority Muslim country that declared independence in 2008 with the backing of the United States. It has striven to emphasize its secular, pro-Western outlook and each spring invites leaders of faith communities worldwide to discuss interreligious cooperation at a conference.

Serbian-speaking Jews for the most part left during the 1999 war with Serbia, and most of the remaining community speaks Albanian, the language of the country’s Muslim majority.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.