The foundation stone was laid by Prime Minister Vlado Buckovski at a ceremony attended by senior government officials, foreign diplomats, Macedonian Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and guests from Israel.
Under the country's denationalisation law, the possessions of the Macedonian Jews who perished in Nazi death camps during the Second World War have been transferred into a Holocaust Memorial Fund set up by the Macedonian government and will be used for the construction of the Centre.
The leader of the Jewish community in Macedonia, Samuel Sadikario, said at the ceremony that stone blocks from Jerusalem and the Macedonian town of Bitola would be built into the foundations of the Centre and would bear the names of all Macedonian Jews killed in the Holocaust.
In March 1943, 7,200 Macedonian Jews were deported to the Treblinka death camp in Poland, from where none of them returned.