Opening of the first permanent exhibition on the Holocaust – Holocaust in Ljubljana- 1.9.2023
On Friday, 1 September at 6 pm, the President of the Republic of Slovenia, Mrs Nataša Pirc Musar, will open the first permanent exhibition on the Holocaust – Holocaust in Ljubljana, which is being prepared by the Jewish Cultural Centre Ljubljana and the Ljubljana City Museum.
The exhibition is curated by Dr Blaž Vurnik and designed by visual artists Miran Mohar and Vadim Fishkin.
Their new installation “Amsterdam”, dedicated to the Slovenian victims of the Holocaust, will also be on display on this occasion.

The evening will continue with a Shabbat service led by our Rabbi Alexander Grodensky and Cantor Nikola David. In the evening, there will also be a special ceremony on our street, with a rich programme including a puppet show for the youngest children, A Visit to the Sun, and a concert by the Anbot group with klezmer and Ladino music.

About exhibition: After the Axis attacked Yugoslavia on 6 April 1941, the Italian Army arrived in Ljubljana on 11 April. Less than a month later, the so-called Province of Ljubljana was annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. In February 1942, the occupation regime surrounded Ljubljana with barbed wire, and passage in and out of the city was only possible with special passes. The occupation terror included the Italianisation of the city’s appearance, confinements in concentration camps, and the shooting of hostages as a means of retaliation and intimidation. Ljubljana became the centre of the resistance and simultaneously the centre of the collaboration. After the capitulation of Italy, Ljubljana was occupied by the German Army. The occupation regime became even more severe and the German Army, together with the Slovenian Home Guard, seriously threatened the resistance movement. Deportations of people from the Ljubljana region and regular transports to the German concentration camps started taking place.
As soon as in November 1941, the Italian occupation regime started interning most of the Jews from the Ljubljana region, almost all of them in the Ferramonti di Tarsia camp in southern Italy. The representatives of the Ljubljana Jewish community made an unsuccessful attempt to prevent these transports by petitioning High Commissioner Emilio Grazioli directly. The expulsion of Jews from the Ljubljana region first affected those Jews who had come to Ljubljana from elsewhere. These were mainly refugees: by the middle of 1941, there were already several hundred of them in the Province of Ljubljana, with around 150 living in the Cukrarna building alone. As early as in the autumn of 1941, some of the Jewish residents of Ljubljana were deported as well. The expulsions continued in 1942.Some of these deported Jews managed to escape to Switzerland after the Italian occupation, while the others disappeared in the Holocaust. The Ljubljana Jews would also try to avoid internment by abandoning Judaism. Most of the conversions from the Jewish faith or conversions to Catholicism in Ljubljana took place between 1938 and 1941. At the time of the Italian census of the population of the Province of Ljubljana, 139 persons of the Jewish faith were reported to be living there (a total of 339,751 inhabitants of the Province of Ljubljana were included in the census). After the capitulation of Italy and the German occupation of Ljubljana, the Jews who remained in Ljubljana were about to experience the most difficult part of the war. On 14 October 1943, Friedrich Rainer, High Commissioner of the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral, issued an order confiscating all movable and immovable Jewish property in the territory of the Operational Zone. The German occupation authorities intensively searched for Jews in Ljubljana. In 1944 and 1945, they deported them in several transports to the concentration camps in Dachau, Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and Mauthausen. (The text is adapted from an exhibition by dr. Blaž Vurnik)