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HISTORIC MOMENTS
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| Bustle
and brilliance:
British, French, German, and American travelers praised
the prosperity and beauty of Monastir from the 1840s
to the 1930s. |
| Buene
salú y vides:
Until
1863, Monastir's 3,000 Sephardim lived in the Jewish
quarter, called the kortijo by Sephardim, where Judeo-Spanish
reigned supreme. |
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Alas!
alas! A fire from Heaven: On August 14,
1863, Monastir's centuries-old Jewish quarter was
destroyed in a terrible fire that swept through
the city. The fire left virtually all of Monastir's
Jews homeless.
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| "Monastir
interested me greatly:"
In
1894, Monastir was visited by emissaries of the Alliance
Israélite Universelle. The French-Jewish organization
had its eye on Monastir. |
| "Heroic
Monastir!! Now a pile of ruins:"
Between 1903 and 1918, Monastir suffered through a
Macedonian revolt, years of guerilla warfare between
local ethnic factions, the Balkan Wars of 1912-13,
and the First World War. |
| Looking
for the new Eden: Alberto
Arueste arrived in Temuco, Chile, in 1900, and he
encouraged other Monastirlis to move there when he
wrote that the town was a "new Eden." Many
more left for the United States . |
| "We
want to leave the Diaspora:"
After the destruction of the First World War, Jewish
life in Monastir -- now called Bitolj -- was bleak.
But the war also brought the Balfour Declaration,
and with it new hope for a Jewish homeland in the
Eretz Israel. |
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