There are bullet holes in even the oldest graves. The higher up the hill, the older the gravestones. In the tall grass near the top are graves from the sixteenth century, charred by explosions but firmly rooted in the earth. A memorial to victims of the Holocaust, midway down the hill, bears a scar from a mortar round. Below it are more recent tombstones—all of them chipped with 9mm pockmarks.
From the hills overlooking Sarajevo, the Jewish graveyard has sat since the middle of the sixteenth century, a witness to 500 years of war in the Balkans. The graves date back to when the Ladino-speaking Jews arrived, refugees from the Spanish Inquisition. During the siege of Sarajevo in the mid-1990’s, the cemetery was on the front lines. Serb snipers crouched behind the tombstones and picked off people in the city. From the graveyard, they had a perfect view to Bulevar Mese Selimovica, the street that became known as Sniper Alley: children, taxi-drivers, journalists, and housewives scurried through the sights of the snipers behind the graves. Landmines were strewn between the stones to hold the line.
My taxi driver, a Bosnian Muslim, told me that this was where he fought the Serbs. He lifted his sleeve to show a scar on his arm and pointed toward the edge of the cemetery. His English was not very good and I could not understand what he was trying to say. He pointed again to some of the graves, to some of the damage, and then to his arm again. “Boom Boom,” he said and squeezed his arm over the scar. I got the point.
Someone had spraypainted a black swastika on a grave near the front of the cemetery. It was small and sloppy, likely the work of a teenager, but the crossed black lines gave me pause. I thought of the recent violence toward Jews in France and Spain, and wondered whether the Jews of Sarajevo were in similar danger.
And then I visited Club Friends on their annual summer trip. A children’s program run through the Sarajevan Jewish community center, Club Friends has met every Sunday since the war ended in 1995. I joined them for a soccer game on the slope of Mt. Igman overlooking the city. The Club members represent every regional ethnicity: there are Jews and Muslims and Croats and Serbs. There are Serb/Croat children and Jewish/Muslim children. Yet despite its diverse membership, there are few conflicts among the children in the club. When asked about this harmony, so inconsistent with the region’s history of ethnic warfare, one boy told a visiting researcher that the kids did not want to “mess things up the way their parents did.”
With their youth program flourishing, yet their graveyard vandalized and their population small and aging, the Sarajevan Jews’ situation appears utterly paradoxical. In the context of recent events in other European countries, it emerges as even more unique: In France, Germany, and across Europe, violence against Jews has been on the rise. In April 2004 alone, 400 attacks took place against French Jewish people and institutions—double the number that occurred in France during the entire year of 2002. And the violence has been spreading across Europe: 2004 saw attacks in Brussels, Strasbourg, Lyon, and Marseille. French police have attributed the violence to North African youths acting out of anger toward Israel and the situation in the Middle-East.
This time around, European Jews are taking precautions. Synagogues and Jewish community centers have been bolstering their security, and armed guards watch over the main synagogues in Vienna and Rome around the clock. Most European synagogues search the bags of all who enter. Though France and Germany have different histories with their Jewish populations than the former Yugoslavia, the trend across Europe has been toward increased violence and increased security.
Sarajevo’s population is 90% Muslim. Over the last two years, news agencies and intelligence services have reported that Al Qaeda operatives are using the city as a recruiting ground, and a recent Dateline special featured an Al Qaeda safehouse in Sarajevo. Most of Sarajevo’s Muslims live secular lives, but growing frustration with a depressed post-war economy and anxiety about United States policy toward the Muslim world have been giving extremist groups a foothold in the region.
Sarajevo’s Jewish community center—from which Club Friends, among other programs, is run—is located in an Ashkenazi synagogue near the center of town. The pink Moorish-style temple houses offices, a social hall, and a place of worship for the roughly 700 members of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. The building is pocked with bullet holes and scars from mortar blasts, and a sunburst pattern etched into the stone by shrapnel decorates its outer wall. Given Sarajevo’s population, sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians and of Muslims worldwide, I expected the Sarajevan Jews would be on red-alert, picturing their community center as some sort of fortified compound ringed with sandbags and security cameras. Yet the Jewish community, which has seen little but war for the past century, has no security guards or metal detectors, no fences, barbed wire, or barriers. I walked in without so much as being asked my name. At first I thought it was strange—but when I learned their story, I saw that it wasn’t strange at all.
“We have lived together for hundreds of years,” said Dragica Levi, Secretary General of La Benevolencija, the humanitarian arm of the Jewish community. “We have not had problems with our neighbors, except during World War II. But that was something different.” During the Holocaust, though many Muslims, Serbs, and Croats risked their lives hiding Jewish neighbors, Sarajevo’s Jewish population was routed, and in the post-war years many of the surviving Jews fled to Israel. Those who remained in Bosnia began to rebuild. Their integration was aided by Yugoslavia’s suppression of ethnic differences, and under Tito, Jews held top government positions and became leaders in academia, business, and the arts.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, latent ethnic tensions between Muslims, Catholic Croats, and Christian Orthodox Serbs rose to the surface, and Yugoslavia itself began to crumble. In June of 1991, Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. Later that month arguments over the question of independence broke out between the Jews of Serbia and Croatia at the annual meeting of Yugoslavian Jewish leaders. On all sides, loyalties were divided between Yugoslavian Jewry—a group that had met every year since the end of World War II—and their own national identity. And if there were tensions between the Jewish communities, it was clear that greater violence was coming. \t
The leaders of Sarajevo’s Jewish community—Jacob Finci, head of La Benevolencija, and Ivan Ceresnjes, the community’s president—knew that trouble in Yugoslavia meant trouble in Sarajevo. Bosnia was the most ethnically mixed of the former Yugoslavian republics, and integral to the “Greater Serbia” that Slobodan Milosovic aspired to rule. Radovan Karadzic, leader of the Bosnian Serbs, had warned that if Bosnia declared independence, its citizens would find themselves on a “highway of hell.” So when they returned from that 1991 meeting, Finci and Ceresnjes began to prepare for the worst. They met with local doctors to figure out what supplies would be most crucial, and sought help from the New York-based Jewish Joint Distribution Committee—also known as “the Joint”—who sent stockpiles of medicine, bandages, and body bags. For the first time since World War II, the community packed up the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated manuscript from the fourteenth century, and sent it to a secret location known only by Ivan Ceresnjes.
The following April, the Bosnian parliam
ent passed a referendum declaring independence. Barricades were shortly erected around Sarajevo, and on April 6th, Serb forces clashed with the Bosnian police, starting the civil war. One night soon afterwards—the first evening of heavy shelling—Ivan Ceresnjes arrived at the community center to work. To his surprise, he found about five dozen people asleep on the floors and benches. He didn’t know who they were, but since the building was open to the public, he assumed that they were “frightened people from the neighborhood,” he said, who did not know where else to go. But Ceresnjes didn’t turn them away, and after that, the Jewish community center was open to all who needed it.
That turned out to be many. True to his threat, Radovan Karadzic, along with Bosnian Army commander Ratko Mladic, embarked on an ethnic cleansing campaign of mass rapes and massacres that indeed turned much of Bosnia into a hell. Serb forces drove Muslims from their homes, stole their identity papers, and destroyed their mosques. They surrounded Sarajevo, which sits in a valley, with tanks and artillery. For the next three years, cut off from the outside world, the city was bombarded and starved while the Bosnian army, made up of police and local conscripts, tried to keep the city from falling.
Sarajevo did not fall to the Serbs. But the siege killed tens of thousands and dashed the idea of ethnic brotherhood that the 1984 Sarajevo Olympics had suggested. The old Olympic stadium had to be turned into a graveyard.
Tzitzko, a descendant of a former Sarajevan rabbi, is the community center’s chef. His hair is a stately white and he sports a pointed goatee on his chin. With his unflappable politeness and refined manner, he could be head chef at any upscale restaurant. When the war broke out, he began preparing hot meals for those who sought shelter, and his regular customers included Jews, Muslims, Croats, and Serbs alike. With one hand tucked formally behind his back, he ladled out stews, bits of meat, or rice and beans. “As long as Tzitzko was in the kitchen, everyone would get something to eat,” a community member told me. “The community ran the only soup kitchen that was open every day of the war.”
The center became a base of operations for the community’s aid programs, which were vast. Through their two-way radio provided by the Joint, they passed messages between members of separated families. The community opened three pharmacies—according to Finci, “the best pharmacy in town”—created a clinic in the community center, and arranged for doctors to pay visits to homebound patients. Under the Jewish community’s aegis, Muslim and Croat nurses, doctors, and volunteers took to the streets, rushing under the mortar blasts and in the sights of snipers to treat the wounded. A psychologist who worked with the community immediately after the war told me that, if not for the Jewish community’s arrangements, many more residents of Sarajevo would have died. When the siege ended, La Benevolencija had given away over 1.5 million medical prescriptions, cooked 110,000 meals, and distributed 360 tons of food. And their aid didn’t stop with the necessities; they also arranged for entertainment and threw parties.
La Benevolencija’s outreach extended even further: during the war, the organization employed an equal number of Jews and Muslims as well as Serbs and Croats. There seemed to be no doubt among any Jewish community members that their services should be available to all. I asked Jakob Finci how this was possible, why the community would want to open its doors so wide. “The answer, from my point of view,” he replied, “is a simple one. After more than 450 years of living together with citizens of Sarajevo of different religious and ethnic backgrounds, we became part of Bosnian society. We are well incorporated, but not assimilated in Bosnia, and during the war, under the siege and permanent attacks, we became all as extended family.”
As the conflict wore on, the Jews emerged as the closest thing Sarajevo had to a neutral party. Jacob Finci, using connections with his counterparts in Zagreb and Belgrade and his support from the Joint, negotiated with the Serbs to keep the Jews’ supply lines running in and out of the city. They organized a postal service that got mail through the Serb lines. Often, when other aid trucks were turned away or held for days, La Benevolencija’s deliveries passed right through.
It was not just neutrality and influential friends that helped the Jews. According to Yechiel Bar-Chaim, a Joint field worker during the conflict, “an awareness of the Holocaust, of what had already happened to the Jews of this region, was one of the elements that everyone had in mind.” Empathy with the Jews, Bar-Chaim said, was nearly universal. Parallel to this understanding, there may have been a Serb fear of international intervention if Europe or the U.S. suspected a second genocide attempt against European Jews. Either way, the Jewish community’s unique ability to import food and supplies ensured not only that their own would be fed—a priority—but that they could feed many of their neighbors as well.
Because they were not aligned with any of the ethnicities involved in the conflict, the Jews were able to negotiate with the Serb commanders who had the city surrounded. At the start of the war, in coordination with officials in Belgrade, they arranged two airplanes to evacuate women and children; the Bosnian government insisted on clearing the passenger list, but once that hurdle was jumped, many families put their loved ones on airplanes to safety. When the fighting grew intense, air transport was no longer an option, so the Jews convinced the Serbs to authorize bus convoys out of the otherwise-sealed city to evacuate “their people.” Jewish Sarajevans had first priority on the buses, but given decades of intermarriage and the many non-Jewish community members, it was natural to extend the invitation further. In the end, over one thousand non-Jews left Sarajevo—nearly half of the total number whose escapes the Jewish community arranged. Finci, Ceresnjes, and the Joint field staff negotiated ceasefires while the buses were leaving, and as other convoys throughout Bosnia were being stopped—their passengers detained or killed—every one of La Benevolencija’s convoys got out unharmed.
These “Jewish cease-fires” are a testament to the skillful negotiations of the community leaders and the goodwill extended to Bosnia’s Jews by all parties to the conflict. But the evacuations came with a price: many of the older Jews who had survived the Nazi occupation had rebuilt their community, and how they had to watch the younger generation board buses and leave. As Ceresnjes recalled in Edward Serotta’s Survival in Sarajevo, “We all knew the heart of our community was already gone. Everything we had built over the past forty years had come to an end.”
Dada Pappo is a stylish woman in her forties who, though Christian, has worked with La Benevolencija since the war. She lives in a beautiful apartment near the center of town, where she served me Turkish Delight and her homemade liquor, Travaritza, as she pointed out all of the places that bullets and mortar had hit her home. “There were a lot of terrible times,” she said, gesturing with a powerful Bosnian cigarette between her fingers. “Even in the war, we tried to live well, though this was not always possible. A mortar destroyed the apartment above mine. If the neighbors had not been staying with me at the time, they would have been killed.” One of her neighbor’s children had stopped by for a visit, and they laughed as they remembered gathering during the war to sing and play the guitar. “You know,” said Dada, &l
dquo;it was during the war that were some of the best times too. We laughed and played music and we all came together.”
Dada has been instrumental in the Jewish community’s work with Sarajevan children, whom the Serbs made a particular target for violence. A trained psychiatrist, Radovan Karadzic must have known that attacking children—the community’s future—would push his enemies to the breaking point, and Serb tactics included creating rape camps and executing children in front of their parents. One shell, which landed in a kindergarten playground and killed several children, was engraved with the words “a hot kiss from us to you.”
Jaca, now a writer, turned eleven during the siege. “On my birthday, I was walking to school,” she told me. “I lived near the Holiday Inn and had to cross the famous Mese Selimovica—you know, ‘Sniper Alley.’” Telling her story ten years later, her voice shook. “I was walking with my friends when a bullet hit the pavement in front of me. I turned to run backwards but a bullet hit there too, so I lay down on the road next to my friend, like we had been taught. He had been shot in the head. I thought I would have profound thoughts when I was about to die, but all I could think was that it was good today was my birthday. My parents would save money on engraving the headstone. I lay there for hours. The sniper would shoot near me sometimes to tell me he was still watching. The UN tank came and escorted me to safety.” By the time she finished, she was crying. “Everyone has stories,” she said. “When we hear thunder, everyone in the city ducks for cover.”
Under siege, the community started a Sunday school to teach Jewish children about their religion—something that had never been a priority before. With so many of the community members gone, I imagine that these lessons were designed to preserve the community’s cultural ties to Judaism. But it had more immediate effects, too: children would come to the program and ask if they could bring their non-Jewish friends. The school began drawing non-Jewish children in droves.
These friendships were natural; in Sarajevo, there has always been intermarriage between the ethnic groups. “I never thought about ethnicity before the war,” said Jaca. “My grandmother was Jewish, my father was Muslim, my mother was Catholic. We were a little of everything. When the war started, my friends began to ask me ‘What are you?’ I said I didn’t know. They told me I was a Muslim, so I came home and told my father I was a Muslim. The next day, my Catholic friends said, ‘no, you’re no Muslim. You’re a Catholic like us.’ So I went home and told my father I was a Catholic.” Many young people, like Jaca, were forced to think about ethnicity for the first time during the war, to identify themselves and think of others as the enemy.
“But it didn’t matter,” she concluded. “We were all in the same situation—we could all die at any moment, anywhere.” Dada echoed this sentiment when, sitting in her apartment, I sipped the Travaritza and delicately tried to broach the subject of ethnicity. “Are you Jewish?” I blurted out. “Me?” she smiled. “No. I am not very religious, though I was raised a Christian.”
Nonetheless, along with a Jewish woman named Giselle, Dada founded Club Friends. The Club, which still meets today, was intended as a venue in which to address the traumatic experiences that every child had during the war, and its leaders worked to make it a safe space in which to do that. During the Jewish High Holidays, non-Jewish children from the Club attend temple services. The club members also visit Catholic, Muslim, and Christian Orthodox services on each religion’s respective holidays. By experiencing each other’s faith, the hope is that future ethnic conflict will be prevented.
This summer, on the Club’s weeklong trip into the mountains outside the city, Club Friends campers ranged from seven to 17 years old. “At first,” said one mother, “the children didn’t know how to play. They had not been able to play outside for so long. They were very nervous.” When the children do play, it is clear that the war has left its mark. I joined them for soccer on a field not far from a hotel that was built for the 1984 Olympics. Now the building is a bombed-out shell, unapproachable for fear of landmines.
Marco, a twelve-year-old Serb/Croat boy, invited Benja—an unathletic Jewish camper—to play with us. Meanwhile, Moamar, a Muslim teenager who acted as a junior counselor for the Club, ran up and down the field making sure every child got the ball. He took a light shot at the goal and Benja blocked it easily. I was playing goalie when Marco found a spent shell casing on the ground and ran over to hand it to me. “From the war,” was all he said, and then chased off again after the ball.
When the Dayton Accords ended the war in 1995, Bosnia was divided: the Republic of Srbska is dominated by ethnic Serbs and the Federation of Bosnia is dominated by Bosnian Muslims, and the tension between the two regions remains great. Meanwhile, the Jewish community began to rebuild. The Joint provided funds and technical support, and the Norwegian Government de-mined the Jewish cemetery. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees sent plastic sheeting and building materials. But no amount of material aid could bring about the social healing needed. There was no one who was not traumatized and exhausted; no one had not lost someone. Many members of the community, including Dragica Levi—who will retire as La Benevolencija’s Secretary General this year—still refuse to talk about the events of the war. The memories are too painful.
Today, the Jewish community appears to be thriving. Religious life is on the rise, as Sarajevans who spent the war in Israel return with new knowledge. There is still no rabbi, but a local man named David leads regular Shabbat services, which are attended by 20 to 30 people each week. There is a women’s group where community members learn about kashrut and other aspects of traditional Jewish home life. And because education is free in Bosnia, Dragica told me, young people are beginning to return there to study. Their primary concerns seem to be finding work and something to do on a Friday night, but their presence gives hope to the older generation.
The Jewish community center also runs inter-ethnic support groups for women who have breast cancer, drawing members from both the Federation of Bosnia and the Republic of Srbska. They bring meals and medical care to the elderly and homebound. They run education programs to teach children about all the major religions in Sarajevo. Their office bustles with activity. Foreign diplomats, journalists, and representatives of aid organizations pass in and out to speak with the community leaders.
In the summer of 2004, the community re-consecrated the old Sephardic synagogue as a place of worship—a decade after the war and after sixty years without a religious service under its roof. A Jewish museum opened on the upstairs floors. On major holidays, a visiting rabbi will lead the community in Sephardic prayer. The synagogue is surrounded by a stone wall, behind which a shaded courtyard looks much as it has for centuries. Located in the center of town, it sits near the old Turkish quarter—practically on the same street as a cathedral, two mosques, and an Orthodox church.
But how long this harmony will last remains an open question. Most Sarajevan Jews are over fifty years old. With a 40% unemployment rate, many younger Jews leave if they have the chance, and those who left during the war mostly do not return. “The
community is too old,” said Jaca’s boyfriend Ernest, a DJ who spent the war in Israel with his family. The three of us were sitting on a roof overlooking the city. Ernest, now 23, had returned to try to rent his family apartment for some extra money and arrange an Israeli visa for Jaca, whose grandmother was Jewish. He was hoping the community could help him with the visa, but he did not seem to have much use for it beyond that. “They need to reach out to young people,” he said. “It sucks here and young people want to leave. If you visit me in Tel Aviv, then we’ll have something to do.” Young people of all ethnicities told me the same thing: they were angry, fed up with the Bosnian economy and sick of having nothing fun to do. With high unemployment, low morale, and an abundance of bars and drug dealers, Sarajevo could be an atmosphere ripe for hate.
But members of the Jewish community that I spoke to echoed the same sentiment: that they have few problems with anti-Semitism. There has been a single incident in the past two years: a few graves in the Jewish cemetery were toppled, and someone painted the swastika I’d seen on one of the stones. Given the experience of Jewish communities around the world—and the violence that other ethnic groups in Sarajevo have suffered—the act of what were likely a few teenagers seemed minor.
I asked Dragica about the goodwill that the Jews of Sarajevo have received, whether it was because of the community’s generosity during the crisis. She just scoffed at the suggestion. “You see, it was like this before the war too,” she said. “We have always been relatively safe. We are not like other places.”
