The Zionist´s Help in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The Rescue of the Central European Jews 1933-1941

• Applicant: Dr. Marija Vulesica
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2015 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 280820387

Between 1933 and 1941 more than 50,000 Jews from Central Europe fled across the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The specific feature of the Yugoslav exile was that the state and the authorities allowed the refugees to enter the country, but they relinquished their reception and supply almost entirely to the Jewish organizations. They were in turn, and here is another specific feature of the Yugoslav Exile, mostly Zionist oriented and led. The goal of the proposed research project is to identify and reconstruct the transnational auxiliary structures and networks as well as the individual efforts that enabled the rescue of thousands of Jews. This reconstruction will be preceded by a study of the political and intellectual changes that the Jews of Yugoslavia went through on their way to Zionist-dominated communities. The analysis of the internal Zionist´s debates on Nazism, it´s anti-Jewish policy and it´s foothills in Yugoslavia will make a significant contribution to the understanding of the European dimension that the Nazi policies have had from the start. In the Yugoslav case, unlike any other European exile at the time, the arriving Central European Jews encountered a Jewish host society, counting itself no more than 70.000 Jews. This Jewish host society, it´s organizations and actors, it´s national and transnational spaces of action are still unexplored. The relevance of the Yugoslav exile has already been recognized by the German-speaking researchers, systematic studies about the flight routes and flight possibilities of Central European Jews into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia are still missing though. This project aims to analyze the transnational networks between Yugoslav and Central European Jewish organizations by executing the theoretical concepts of the Transnational History and the Entangled History. In addition, cultural, economic and personal ties between the German and Yugoslav spaces, which became obvious due to the refugee´s movement, will be reconstructed for the first time. A focus on the Yugoslav-Zionist networks and actors will also give the Social and (New) Cultural History of Yugoslav spaces in the interwar period a lasting impetus. A superior goal of my research is the implementation of different aspects of the Yugoslav-Jewish history, such as the (pre) history of the Holocaust, within the German-speaking Studies on Southeastern Europe. It is my goal to expand these Studies thematically and thereby promote them within the international context.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants