History of the Jews in Serbia

Serbian Jews
Српски Јевреји
יהדות סרביה

A plaque dedicated to the Jews of Subotica murdered in the Holocaust: "In memory of the 4,000 Jews with whom we lived and built Subotica together who perished in fascist death camps in World War II."
Total population
709 (2022 census)[1]
Languages
Serbian, Hebrew, Ladino, and Yiddish
Religion
Judaism
Related ethnic groups
Sephardi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Montenegrin Jews

The history of the Jews in Serbia is some two thousand years old. The Jews first arrived in the region during Roman times. The Jewish communities of the Balkans remained small until the late 15th century, when Jews fleeing the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions found refuge in the Ottoman-ruled areas, including Serbia.

The community flourished and reached a peak of 33,000, of whom almost 90% were living in Belgrade and Vojvodina, before World War II. About two-thirds of Serbian Jews were murdered in The Holocaust. After the war, most of the remaining Jewish Serbian population emigrated, mainly to Israel.

In the 2022 census, only 709 people declared themselves as Jewish. The Belgrade Synagogue continues to function as a synagogue. The Subotica Synagogue, once the fourth largest synagogue building in Europe, is now mainly a cultural space, but is available for services and other religious purposes.^[2] The Novi Sad Synagogue has been converted into a cultural art space.