The script for the performance is based on the materials collected by Robert Waltl and Boris Hajdinjak as part of the project Spotikavci v Ljubljani (Stolpersteine in Ljubljana) and published in the booklet Holokavst v Ljubljani (Holocaust in Ljubljana) (Jewish Cultural Centre Ljubljana, 2019), the materials for the exhibition Holokavst v Ljubljani (Holocaust in Ljubljana) prepared by Dr. Blaž Vurnik for the JKC Ljubljana and the Ljubljana City Museum, as well as on the numerous testimonies and photographs collected by the Jewish Cultural Centre Ljubljana.
Before the Second World War, Ljubljana was home to a number of Jewish families, although the community was relatively small, numbering less than 200 people. They had their own customs, their own habits. People of Jewish origin also lived in Križevniška Street. As in many streets in our city. They lived here from ancient times. They lived peacefully. They were doctors, students, merchants, shoemakers, bankers, builders, lawyers, ... They married each other, but also outside their families and religion. They cultivated their own customs. Sometimes more openly, sometimes more covertly, depending on the times, politics and the social mood. After the occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, the situation worsened for Jews on Slovenian soil. The Jewish religion was otherwise practised by fewer than a thousand believers in the territory of the pre-war Drava province, most of them in Prekmurje. The German occupier persecuted the Jews most in its occupied territory in Styria and Gorenjska, while the Italian and Hungarian occupiers took a more lenient stance, especially towards the Jews who had already lived in the occupied territory before the Second World War.
When the Italians occupied Ljubljana, many young Jews worked with the Liberation Front. More than many Slovenes, Jewish families were aware of the danger of fascism and nazism. Very soon, however, bans on Jewish inhabitants also appeared in Ljubljana. The Pollak, Ebenspanger, Bolaffio, Silberstein, Steinberg, Baumgarten, Moskovič, Kapper, Lorant, Goldstein, Oblat,... families were targeted.
In the street play-performance Jewish Life in Ljubljana, for which the script and text were prepared by Robert Waltl and Vinko Möderndorfer, actors from Mini teater and Yiddishpiel teater from Israel have joined together, under the direction of the Israeli director Yonatan Estrkin, already well-known to the Slovenian audience. In eight scenes they will present a fragment of pre-war Jewish life in Ljubljana with Jewish customs and celebrations, as well as the occupation and the Holocaust period in Ljubljana, when thousands of refugees joined the local Jews, first from Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, and after 1941, especially hundreds of Croatian Jews, who were persecuted by the NDH and found a temporary safe haven in Ljubljana. The performance will then take us through the persecution of the Jews of Ljubljana and their deportation to the extermination camps, to their participation in the Liberation Front and the partisan units. All of this will be linked by Jewish music, performed live by musicians from the Kletzmer Trio. The performance will be in Slovene, Hebrew and Yiddish with simultaneous translation.
