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Holocaust Memorial Centre opens in Skopje

11.03.2011

A memorial center dedicated to Holocaust victims opened in Skopje yesterday.  The memorial is a multimedia center with photos, narratives, and video clips showing the life of the Jewish communities in the Balkans and their suffering during World War II.

The inauguration ceremony was marked by symbolical placing of three urns with ashes of those killed in the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland.  Senior government officials, including President Gjorge Ivanov, were joined at the ceremony by Albanian President Bamir Topi and Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon.

An estimated 66,000 of Yugoslavia's 80,000 Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and only about 200 Jews live in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia today, the majority in Skopje.