The Holocaust Memorial Center for the Jews of Macedonia opened in 2011 on the banks of the Vardar River, near the old Jewish quarter of Skopje. It commemorates the 7,148 Jews from Macedonia and Thrace who were deported to Treblinka in March 1943 and documents the history of Jewish life in Macedonia from antiquity to the present.
The exhibition is chronologically arranged, beginning with the long history of Sephardic Jewish settlement in the Balkans — descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 who made cities like Skopje, Sarajevo, and Thessaloniki their home — and tracing the history through to the deportations and their aftermath. Individual testimonies and family documents make the statistics human. The building is modern, purpose-built, and well designed. One of the most serious and affecting museums in the western Balkans; do not skip it.