Macedonia Opens Holocaust Memorial Centre

A ceremony has been held to open the centre, including the formal placement of three urns containing ashes from the Treblinka concentration camp, where over 7,000 Jews from Macedonia, almost the entire Jewish population of the country at the time, were murdered in March 1943.

The containers were brought to the country in 1961 and have been displayed in Bitola, Skopje and Stip - the three cities from where Macedonian Jews were deported to the Treblinka camp on the territory of occupied Poland on March 11, 1943.

Military guards transfered the urns from the Museum of the City of Skopje to the Holocaust Memorial Centre on Thursday, thus marking the official opening of the building.

Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, Israel's Vice Premier Moshe Ya'alon, along with other representatives of the Jewish community addressed the ceremony.

Many other foreign representatives and dignitaries were present at the opening.

The Memorial Centre will include a multimedia area and will be enriched with other artifacts and features in the coming years.
 
Built with the money that the local Jewish community received from the state as compensation for their losses, the Centre is considered to be fourth in the world after similar centres in Israel, the US and Germany.