Yellow star - Tunisian Jew
This not my area of collecting at all and probably never will be, but I saw this on an Israeli auction site and the description had a story that I had never considered or heard about before, the forced labor of Tunisian Jews during the German occupation. I thought it worth posting here out of interest.
This has to be extremely rare, if its real. I’ve pasted the auction description below which has a couple of inaccuracies in it, and it references the diary of an SS officer (I’ve linked the article) who gave the instruction, but he mentions a ‘yellow patch’ not a star, and it’s a five-pointed star which is odd in itself. The bidding opened at $600 and now at $1100, so at least two people accept it.
Yellow badge of a Jew from Tunisia, early 1940s
Steve
A yellow badge that belonged to a Jew from Tunisia during the Holocaust. Tunisia, early 1940s. extremely rare.
In March 1943, the Tunisia Jews were forced to wear a yellow badge as a sign of Jewish forced labor, but it was not enforced because of pressure from the Italians. This duty was imposed only in two cities. In Sfax, (a large and central city in Tunisia, where 100 Jewish workers were required to unload military vehicles and build shelters), and partly in Tunis. In other cities, enforcement was not strict. This is why a yellow patch from the Tunisia region is rare and almost nonexistent.
Tunisia was the only country in the Islamic countries to be ruled by the Germans. Between 1940 and 1943, the Jews of Tunisia suffered direct and indirect Nazi rule. The laws of the Nazi regime discriminating against the Jews, including the wear of the yellow star, also applied to the Jews of Tunisia. Many Tunisian Jews were sent to forced labor camps. On November 9, 1942, the German and Italian forces entered Tunisia in response to the Allied invasion of Algeria and Morocco. The invasion of the Germans was hastened when the Americans landed in North Africa. The Germans acted to speed up the occupation and surpass the American forces that came to the area. The handling of Jewish affairs was transferred to the German-Italian command, headed by a German general. At the end of November 1942, the Germans took the first anti-Jewish move in the region by arresting four of the community leaders, including Moshe Borjel, the president of the community. The dignitaries were released after a week following the intervention of other important people such as the mayor of Tunis and the Italian consul.
It is reasonable to assume that if the German army had remained in Tunisia, the situation of the Jews would have worsened. But this army, composed of a few weak soldiers, was an army of disobedience and self-confidence, surrounded by the Allies from all directions, unable to retreat, and invested all its forces in survival. On Friday, May 7, 1943, the Allies liberated Tunisia from the Germans. After six days the campaign in Tunisia came to an end. In 1946, the Jewish community in the Tunisian capital numbered about 34,200 people. In 1945 the wave of immigration to Eretz Israel began, first as an illegal immigration and after the establishment of the State of Israel, a legal immigration within the framework of the Jewish Agency and Youth Aliyah.
In 2015, the diary of the SS officer in Tunisia who was responsible for the order to mark the Jews in this area with a yellow patch was revealed - "I gave an order to mark with a yellow patch"
A piece of cloth 9x7 cm, on which the yellow star is sewn: 5x6 cm. very good condition.
Link to the article referenced (it's in English)
יומנו של קצין אס-אס בתוניסיה: "נתתי פקודה לסמן בטלאי צהוב"
Steve
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- Larry C
by Tinhat
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