The stories of Albanians who saved Jews during the dark days of Holocaust and the history of the Jewish community in Albania over the centuries will be chronicled in a memorial site, namely the Albanian Jewish Museum be built in Vlora’s historic center and funded by the Albanian-American Development Fund (AADF) with the aim of building a contemporary museum institution that will showcase a unique history of coexistence, faith and hope between Albanians and Jews, especially during the World War II.

The winning museum design, due to be built in the southern coastal city of Vlora, was unveiled by Kimmel Eshkolot Architects, a renowned Tel Aviv-based architectural studio, on the eve of the international museum today.

Addressing the presentation ceremony of the winning design, Prime Minister Edi Rama underlined that similar projects should be designed continuously in the future.

“I am really happy that we take another step towards creating the first address of this history, namely a Jewish museum in Vlora. I very much hope that the museum will be built as soon as possible, also hoping it won’t be the last, because it won’t be sufficient to really chronicle such a really great story about the relations between Albanians and the Jews,” the Premier said.

I think it is one of the missing links in the whole space of the territory of our country, a museum or memorial site displaying a incredible history and perhaps one of the golden pages in the history of Albanians, namely the stories of Albanians who saved Jews, about which a memorial site has yet to be built in this country, and I am really happy that today we take another step towards creating of the first address of this history. A Jewish Museum in Vlora that used to harbour and house an important Jewish community and where we are granted the opportunity for such a structure to be built precisely in the very neighbourhood, where Vlora’s Jewish community was once located.

I would like to highlight the fact that Albania has probably been the only country in Europe to adopt a piece of legislation on observing the Sabbath, legally-binding employers not to penalize Jews who rested from work on Fridays.

In the meantime, a number of documents and even written reports from special envoys of Jewish communities, like the Jewish community of the United States, showing a country demonstrating a special readiness to welcome Jews and provide them shelter and land plots and provide them the opportunity to build their own settlements. More than once, these reports state that Albania is considered as an ideal “reserve homeland” to give safe refuge to Jews and this has been written by the envoys of these communities themselves.

However the Second World War marked the climax all this very long history of ties between Albanians and Jews, because Albania is not only the only country in Europe with more Jews after the Second World War, but is the only country in the world where not a single Jew was handed over to the Nazis.

Having all this said, the history of saving the Jews is not just important to be chronicled in a museum, in two or three, although more are needed to do so, but to show our children and our grandchildren how important this part of our common history is and how people and societies should not lose this sense of humanism and this sense of belonging to the human community that our forefathers showed.

Our cooperation with the Albanian-American Foundation is immensely valuable and significant and extremely productive.

Jewish Museum in Vlora will be the first, but not the only one of its kind. We are preparing and working build a Jewish centre in Tirana as a space to both showcase history, as well as cultivate and promote friendship with Israel, with the people of Israel, the Jewish community, as a long traditional friendship, which has gone through also a period that has not been characterized by the same intensity of those previous years. But the point is that they have grown rich now and when people become extremely wealthy they start suffering issues with the memory. We know this and we will do our best to be as persuasive as we can to strengthen this relationship.