21/05/2026
Gold earrings Amodaj with diamonds and sapphires from the Liberty collection.
I named these Amodaj earrings from the Liberty collection after Rebeka Jakovljević Amodaj, a woman with an unbreakable will who is definitely worth admiring. The mother of four, born on December 25, 1897 in Belgrade, was one of the first Serbian fashion designers and the most famous owners of Belgrade fashion salons in the first half of the 20th century. Rebeka Amodaj was the eldest of eleven children, and when World War I broke out, both of her parents died shortly after each other. Rebeka took care of her younger siblings, trained as a seamstress, and thanks to her skill, diligence, exceptional sense of fashion, and entrepreneurial talent, opened her first fashion salon in 1919. Around that time, she also married Samuil Jakovljević, a military engineer, who was a great support to her throughout their life together. Just a few years after opening the salon, she is considered the most famous owner of a fashion salon for women’s clothing. In 1928, she employed 36 workers in her salon, and around 1930, she used the money she earned to build a family villa with a garden and a swimming pool in an exclusive Belgrade villa district and an apartment building in the city center. The ground floor housed a fashion salon, Rebeka lived with her family on the upper floors, and the attic housed tailoring workshops. Just before World War II, she employed up to 52 workers. In 1941, Rebeka, who came from a Jewish family, was arrested along with her children and interned by the Italian occupation authorities in a concentration camp in Albania, where she would live until the end of the war. However, upon returning to Belgrade, she realized that she would no longer be able to continue her work there, so in 1948, together with some family members, she left for Palestine, today’s Israel, where, as a fifty-year-old woman, she managed to shine again on the fashion scene. She devoted herself to fashion in her successful fashion salon until the end of her life. Rebecca Jakovljević Amodaj died in Tel Aviv in 1981.
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