Ruth E. Gruber

The violent breakup of Yugoslavia which began in 1991 and the bloody civil war that accompanied it had far-reaching and traumatic effects on the 5,000 to 6,000 Jews who lived in the country.

Yugoslavia was a loose federation of six republics: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, and Montenegro. By the end of 1992, Slovenia and Croatia were independent states; civil war still raged in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the status of Macedonia was unclear. Serbia and Montenegro alone made up a rump Yugoslavia.

Until the division of the country, Yugoslav Jews had belonged to communities joined in autonomous republic-wide organizations which in turn were members of a nationwide Federation based in Belgrade.

Most Jews were concentrated in the capital cities of three of the republics: Zagreb, capital of Croatia, with about 1,200 Jews, Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with about 1,000, and Belgrade, capital of Serbia and also the federal capital, with about 1,500 Jews. The remaining Jews lived in much smaller scattered communities, mostly in Croatia and Serbia’s Vojvodina province. Fewer than 100 Jews lived in Slovenia, and only 100 in Macedonia.

There was little overt anti-Semitism, and the rate of intermarriage was high. Through the 1980’s participation grew in wide-ranging programs and activities run by the Federation and the individual communities (with the help of international Jewish philanthropic organizations). These included a summer camp on the Adriatic Sea, annual Maccabi sports competitions, old-age care facilities, women’s and youth groups and educational programs including religion classes, Hebrew classes, and the first Jewish kindergarten in Yugoslavia in more than a decade, which opened in Zagreb, the most active community, in 1989. Yugoslavia had only one rabbi–Belgrade-based Cadik Danon–but by the late 1980s one young man was in Israel studying to become a rabbi, and several others were training as cantors or lay leaders for religious services.

Although Yugoslavia had not restored diplomatic relations with Israel broken after the Six-Day War in 1967, commercial and cultural ties as well as cooperation in the areas of sports and tourism burgeoned during the 1980s. Slovenia’s Adria Airlines established direct flights to and from Israel in 1989. Yugoslavia’s Jews also maintained close ties with various international Jewish organizations, and by the late 1980s Yugoslav government officials also met with Jewish and Israeli representatives. At a meeting in New York in July 1987, Yugoslav leader Lazar Mojsov told World Jewish Congress president Edgar Bronfman that he would “work toward better relations with the Jewish world as a whole and with the State of Israel.”

A landmark cultural event was a major exhibition on the Jews of Yugoslavia which opened in Zagreb in April 1988 and then was shown elsewhere in the country, attracting tens of thousands of visitors, before going on to the United States and Israel. Belgrade’s first Holocaust memorial (aside from memorials in the Jewish cemetery) was dedicated in 1990; it was by the Jewish sculptor Nandor Glid.

The mounting separatism and ethnic tensions that came to the fore in the late 1980s had their effect on the Jewish communities. Some Jews felt that Serbian overtures to Israel including the formation in 1989 of a Serbian-Jewish friendship society and the twinning of various Serbian-Israeli cities were mainly aimed at courting world Jewry to give support to Serbia in its opposition to any decentralization of the state. A leader of the tiny Jewish community in Slovenia warned of possible anti-Semitism after a youth magazine published Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1990. In Zagreb, Jewish leaders at the end of 1990 expressed concern that Croatian nationalism might prompt a resurgence of anti-Semitism, but later threw support behind the Croatian government when it seceded from Yugoslavia and became embroiled in civil war.

When the civil war broke out following Slovenian and Croatian secession in the summer of 1991, the status of Jewish communities again became a political issue. Serbs and Croats attempted to discredit each other with accusations of anti-Semitism. In early 1992 Klara Mandic, a founder of the Serbian-Jewish Friendship Society, visited the United States and in a series of lectures and articles charged the Croatian government of Franjo Tudjman with reviving fascism and anti-Semitism and planning “genocide” against Serbs in Croatia. Nenad Porges, president of the Zagreb Jewish Community, countered by accusing Serbs of anti-Semitism and expressing support for the Tudjman government.

The civil war led to great suffering and destruction, particularly after fighting spread from Croatia to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Jews had to flee their homes along with hundreds of thousands of other citizens, and Jewish monuments and property were damaged or destroyed along with countless other buildings. Among them, the medieval synagogue in Dubrovnik was damaged by bombs; the Jewish community center in Osijek was hit by shelling; and Serbian fighters used the ancient Jewish cemetery overlooking Sarajevo as a position from which to fire onto the city. In Zagreb, terrorist bombs in August 1991 wrecked the Jewish community offices and prayer hall and also damaged the Jewish cemetery.

Starting in April 1992, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee carried out daring air and overland evacuations of almost the entire Jewish population of Sarajevo.

Almost from the beginning of the civil strife, communications between Zagreb, Sarajevo, and Belgrade were difficult or cut altogether. Local Jewish communities became fully autonomous and ultimately independent as the former Yugoslav republics became independent. In Zagreb, gala celebrations in September 1992 marked the reopening of the Jewish community center and prayer hall after a full-scale restoration, partially funded by local authorities, following a terrorist bombing of the year before.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2003 and is filed under history.