The app which lets you discover a forgotten Jewish world

Visokog Stevana 5. An ordinary residential building in Belgrade’s Dorćol district – the kind you walk past without a second glance. But for centuries, this address was home to the city’s Old Synagogue, demolished in 1952.

Nothing on the street tells you it was ever there.

My work takes me across the world, usually to places that are at war or falling into it. But wherever I go, I do the same thing: walk the streets and wonder what used to here. If you are Jewish, the answer is often depressingly simple: something that has now vanished.

Last year, in the souq of Qamishli in Syria’s Kurdish northeast, I came across a small shop with the name “Ezra” written across its front. It was one of the last traces of a Jewish community that had existed there for millennia but vanished entirely in just a few decades following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Jewish history is too often a story of communities deported, murdered or driven out; of synagogues bulldozed or repurposed; of Jewish names forgotten by the very cities they helped build.

Belgrade is a case in point. I have been to Serbia many times, yet until recently I knew almost nothing of its Jewish past. Before the Second World War, around 12,000 Jews lived in Belgrade. Dorćol, where one street is still called Jevrejska (“Jewish Street”), was the heart of a Sephardi community whose roots stretched back to the Ottoman era. The Nazis and their collaborators destroyed it with sickeningly speed. By the summer of 1942, the German occupiers were boasting that Serbia was “Judenfrei”.

This is why an app called Walk & Learn struck me so forcefully.

The concept is simple. You download it, choose one of five sites on a map of the city, and point your phone at a marker. Augmented reality does the rest, overlaying the street in front of you with images and stories of the people and events that shaped it. The sites range from Sukkat Shalom, Belgrade’s only working synagogue, to the Jewish Community building on Kralja Petra and the site of the Old Synagogue itself.

The app was built by Viral Media, a Belgrade company that has spent years developing VR and AR projects based around history and cultural heritage. Its founder, Dušan Žarković, is clear about the logic. “If we want young people to connect with history, we need to bring it to them in a way that feels natural,” he says. “Today, that means phones and digital technology.”

I asked him what his app does that Google Lens doesn’t. “Google Lens is a great tool, but it shows you what’s in front of you today,” he says. “Walk & Learn shows you what used to be there.” Point Google Lens at that building in Dorćol and it will tell you what it is. Open Walk & Learn and you see the Old Synagogue. “Suddenly, you’re not just looking at a building,” Žarković said. “You’re looking into the past.”

History asks us to imagine what was lost. Walk & Learn lets us see it.

Crucially, Viral Media worked with the Jewish Community of Belgrade and the Jewish Historical Museum, which opened its archives to help inform the app, and with the historians Čedomila Marinković and Davor Salom. For Salom, a member of the community, the aim was to make “the rich history of Serbian-Jewish coexistence accessible and engaging for new generations,” so that these stories “do not remain only in books, but continue to live on the streets of Belgrade.”

The app was launched in May this year in the courtyard of Sukkat Shalom, in front of Serbian officials, Chief Rabbi Isak Asiel and Israel’s ambassador to Serbia, Avivit Bar-Ilan. Soon afterwards, she tweeted that it “brings to life the stories, memories, and places that shaped our shared history in Belgrade.”

The project also reflects a bond that extends beyond politics. ‘It’s a relationship between people, not just between governments,’ Žarković says. “We went through some of the darkest moments of the 20th century together, particularly during the Second World War.”

The app can’t rebuild the Old Synagogue or restore a community destroyed eighty years ago. But memory is not a passive thing. What a city chooses to remember shapes what it becomes, and what it chooses to forget can be forgotten for good. Walk & Learn is a refusal to forget.

It is a small but powerful corrective to one of the oldest problems in Jewish history: erasure.

Nor will it stop at Belgrade. The plan, Žarković told me, is to expand across the Balkans and then to Europe’s larger cities “with rich, layered histories.”

Good. Europe is full of Dorćols: Jewish quarters whose synagogues, schools and shops have disappeared, leaving only street names and silence. Something was here. Now, at last, we can see it.