- A Photographic Memoir: The Jewish Street in Belgrade
Between 1928 and around 1932, Jeremija Stanojević, colonel in the Royal Yugoslav Army and professor in the Military Academy of Belgrade, undertook a very ambitious project. He wanted to create a photographic documentary of all the streets in Belgrade’s old city in order to record the old and new, both the destruction and new construction. An entire set of these negatives was destroyed in April 1941 during the German bombing of Belgrade, when the Military Academy suffered a direct hit to the section of the complex in which these negatives were kept. Fortuitously, however, more than 2,000 negatives stored in the Stanojević family home were saved, thus preserving images of many streets in the old city. Unfortunately, photographs of the direct center of the city were not found among them. Amidst this group of photographs, a number of images survived pertaining directly to the subject to which this volume of Serbian Studies is dedicated—the Jewish experience in Serbia. Currently, in the collection of the Museum of the City of Belgrade, these photographs show the Jewish Street in Dorćol, the ancient section of Belgrade.1 The Jewish street had its start at Cara Dušana Street and descended towards the Danube river. It was intersected by a number of streets, including Visoki Stevan, Solunska, Mike Alasa (Mihajlo Petrović-Alas), and Dunavska Streets. [End Page 259]
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Footnotes
1. Divna Djurić-Zamolo, “Beograd 1930 na fotografijama Jeremije Stanojevića,” Katalog VI: Serija zbirke i legati muzeja grada Beograda (Belgrade: Muzej grada Beograda, 1975), 88–89, figs. 727, 728, 730, and 734.