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From: tippu@snrc.uow.edu.au (Tippu Hassan)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast
Subject: Jewish and Muslim relations in Bosnia.
Date: 28 Apr 1993 00:20:34 GMT
Organization: SNRC, University of Wollongong
Lines: 66
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <1rkiki$1li@falin.cs.uow.edu.au>
Reply-To: tippu@snrc.uow.edu.au
NNTP-Posting-Host: sheep.snrc.uow.edu.au


Found this in soc.culture.pakistan
Might be of interest..... am posting it without the permission of the original poster.
Hope he/she doesnt mind.


By Lance Gay, Scripps-Howard News Service
 
SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- In this land of historic hatreds, a tiny
Jewish community is braving Serbian shells to repay a 50-year-old debt to
Muslims who saved Jews from the Holocaust.
 
Ivica Ceresnjes, president of the Jewish Community of Sarajevo, says he
and about 1,000 other Jews chose to remain in Sarajevo, rather than leave
for Israel, to keep a feeding center in the medieval old town district
running.
 
Ceresnjes said that was partly in gratitude to the Muslims who hid Jews during
the Nazi occupation and partly to keep intact the centuries-old presence of 
Jews living in Sarajevo.
 
``Some with guns are defending Bosnia, but I fight in Bosnia by keeping 
people alive,'' Ceresnjes said.
 
As a student of Balkan history, Ceresnjes said he saw this war coming and 
had ready plans to evacuate children and the elderly. A year before the war
erupted here last April, Ceresnjes said the Jewish center began
stockpiling supplies, ensuring everyone had passports and arranging for
places in Israel and Europe for the evacuees.
 
They were so well prepared, he said, that only five days after the
shooting began the first plane left. Of about 2,000 Jews in Bosnia-
Herzegovina, he estimates half have left. Many of those who stayed behind
work in Sarajevo's downtown synagogue, which has been turned into a
wartime feeding center that has so far given away 380,000 meals.
 
The center, which has been shelled several times along with most of
Sarajevo, also runs a radio station, mail center and distributes food
packages sent by Jewish organizations around the world.
 
While Muslims and Jews are fighting each other in the Mideast, Jews here
say there's a long tradition of cooperation, inter-marriage and
tolerance between the two communities in Sarajevo that goes back to
centuries of Turkish occupation.
 
Sarajevo's Jews trace their ancestry back to their expulsion from Roman
Catholic Spain in 1492. The community numbered more than 14,000 before
World War II. But only 10% survived the Holocaust -- which was carried out
by the pro-Nazi Croatian Ustache in Yugoslavia. Many of the survivors were
hidden by Muslim families in Mostar.
 

-- 
Sharon Machlis Gartenberg
Framingham, MA  USA
e-mail: sharon@world.std.com


----------------------------------------
Zafar.




tippu hassan

