Belgrade, Pesach 1914: Eight Jewish Soldiers Take Their Oath
This film records a military ceremony at Kalemegdan Fortress in Belgrade. Among the new recruits were eight Jewish soldiers, who took their oath before the city's chief rabbi during Chol Hamoed Pesach.
"Zakletva regruta Vardarskog puka" (Oath of the Recruits of the Vardar Regiment), credited to Đoka Bogdanović, April 1914. Preserved and published by the Jugoslovenska kinoteka (Yugoslav Film Archive).
The ceremony at Kalemegdan
On the morning of April 13, 1914, recruits of the Vardar Regiment assembled in the Lower Town of Kalemegdan Fortress. They came from territories that Serbia had gained during the Balkan Wars. The ceremony drew Crown Prince Alexander Karađorđević, Prime Minister Nikola Pašić, military officers and cadets, as well as a large public crowd. The Yugoslav Film Archive puts attendance at more than 15,000.
Most of the recruits took part in a Serbian Orthodox ceremony led by military clergy. Eight Jewish soldiers were sworn in separately by Belgrade's chief rabbi, Isaac Alkalai. The archive describes them, in the terminology of the time, as soldiers of the “Mosaic faith,” and says that they took the oath according to their own religious practice.
The ceremony took place on April 13, 1914, corresponding to 17 Nissan 5674, during Chol Hamoed Pesach.
Rabbi Isaac Alkalai
Alkalai was in his early thirties when this was filmed. Born in Sofia in 1881, he studied at the rabbinical seminary in Vienna and became chief rabbi of Belgrade and Serbia in 1909. He had also served as a Jewish chaplain in the Serbian army during the Balkan Wars.
He later became chief rabbi of Yugoslavia and served in the Yugoslav Senate. After the German occupation in 1941, he escaped the country and eventually settled in New York. There he became a leading rabbi of the Sephardic community. He died in Brooklyn in 1978.
The film and what followed
The Yugoslav Film Archive credits the film to Đoka Bogdanović, one of the early figures in Serbian cinema. The surviving black-and-white reel has Serbian intertitles and records the wider regimental ceremony as well as the Jewish oath.
The ceremony took place less than three months before the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. By the end of July, Serbia and Austria-Hungary were at war. The Jewish soldiers in the film were entering the army just before the First World War began.
The footage also preserves a public moment in the life of Belgrade's prewar Sephardic community. That community was nearly destroyed during the Holocaust. A brief section of a military film is now one of the surviving visual records of its rabbi and soldiers together.
Sources
The film and ceremony details come from the Yugoslav Film Archive catalog. Biographical information about Rabbi Alkalai is from the Encyclopaedia Judaica entry.