A Place for Jews in Sarajevo?

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina —  The American rabbi imported from Jerusalem struggled mightily, leading his congregation in a slow, unsteady sing-along of traditional Hebrew hymns of thanks and praise. By the third refrain, several of those seated in the 94-year-old synagogue were beginning to get the hang of it.

“Da-da-yaynu, da-da-yaynu. Da-yaynu,” the adventurous few sang. “We would have been grateful, grateful and content.”

“No one has to tell you what bitterness is,” Moshe Tutnauer told the gathering. “I hope the bitterness in your country has passed.”

The ceremony this month marked the first celebration of Passover here since the end of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. For many of the more than 500 Jews remaining in Sarajevo, it was a rare connection with the religious tradition that has been lost through decades of communism, assimilation and, most recently, ethnic bloodletting.

Throughout the fighting, the Jewish community here became known around the world for supplying food and medicine from international donors to the war’s victims. Now, as peace begins to settle in, the community that has been helping others survive may be losing its own battle for survival.

Its numbers are dwindling, its people are aging, the traditions are fading. And after years of loyal co-existence, Sarajevo’s Jews are on a collision course with the Bosnian government over property disputes and the rising tide of Muslim nationalism.

“This will be the year of decision for the Jews of Bosnia,” said Jakob Finci, a prominent leader of Sarajevo’s Jews. “The fate of the Jewish community will follow the fate of Bosnia.”

With Bosnia splitting more definitively along ethnic lines, Finci added, there may no longer be a place for Jews. And there are other questions that go straight to the heart of the community, its identity and its potential for revival.

These descendants of the 1492 Sephardic exodus from Spain have no permanent rabbi. Tutnauer was just visiting, and the young yeshiva scholar being prepared for Sarajevo is having second thoughts about returning to such a tiny congregation. There are no regular religious services; of 50 children in Sabbath classes, fewer than half are Jewish. Hardly anyone understands Hebrew, although a small, aging group of old men can still speak Ladino, the language of the original Sephardics.

Most of Sarajevo’s Jews--about 1,000--were evacuated to neighboring Croatia, other European nations and the United States at the start of the war in 1992. A few hundred people, some with only the faintest ties to Jewish heritage, joined the community during the war. The definition of “Jew” was stretched to embrace them; today, only five families have Jewish parents on both sides. The 532 members of the community include 52 newly reunited Jews from Grbavica, a suburban Sarajevo district that was, until recently, under Serbian control.

The Jewish community’s humanitarian aid work, not its religious tradition, was its foundation through the tedious, trying war years. “People were joining the community for their daily bread,” Finci conceded.

The question that Finci and other Jewish elders face now is whether in today’s Bosnia--peaceful, yes, but more nationalist than ever--there is genuine interest in revitalizing the faith.

Finci, a lawyer who is president of the Jewish La Benevolencia humanitarian association, thinks there is. But others worry about the small number of followers, their high average age and the community’s “diluted Jewishness.”

At the Passover ceremony, for example, where women sat in the back, men in the front, only a handful of people were younger than 30. Among them was Svjetlana Papo, 20, who is the daughter of a Muslim mother and the granddaughter (paternal) of a Jew.

“I’m not a pure Jew,” said Papo, a literature student with a quick smile who lives near the synagogue. “I went to Pesach [Passover] to see if there was anything good to eat. . . . I don’t know how to pray to God and I don’t go to temple. A lot of people turned to religion during the war, probably because of fear of death. There were thousands of times I thought, ‘Dear God, let me come home alive.’ But the war is over, and I forgot about God.”

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Slobodan Kosanovic, 50, a computer engineer who has been volunteering at La Benevolencia for the last three or four years, said Bosnians in general, Jews among them, are not very religious, especially after communism. “Our holidays are more of a social gathering than a religious tradition,” said Kosanovic, whose mother was Jewish and father Serbian. “My children do not know what it is to be a Jew.”

Indeed, the Passover service relied on certain improvisations--with kosher meat unavailable, eggs and cheese graced the traditional Seder plate; some women donned yarmulkes, the skullcap commonly worn by men.

The original Sephardic Jews came to Bosnia through Italy and Greece, and, in contrast to other Sephardic migrations, retained their language. The first written record of Jewish residents in Sarajevo dates to 1564. After the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 1800s, the Sephardic Jews were joined by their Ashkenazi counterparts.

The Bosnian capital is the home of the 14th century Sarajevo Haggada, a richly illustrated manuscript telling the story of the Jews’ bondage and flight from Egypt, so treasured it has been put on public display only once since the war began.

Also symbolic of the community’s history is the old Jewish cemetery, founded in 1630 on the side of Mt. Trebevic overlooking the city. Declared a historical monument by UNESCO, the cemetery became a front-line position during the war, has been heavily damaged and may still be mined.

The rise of Nazi Germany eventually led to the extermination of most of Bosnia’s Jews, including what had grown to be a 13,000-strong population in Sarajevo.

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Rebuilding in Tito’s post-World War II Yugoslavia meant erasing anti-Semitism, Jewish leaders say, but it also meant subjugating religion. In an effort to paper over ethnic differences and create harmony, Tito banned the use of names of religions in institutions and encouraged atheism.

Jews managed to secure a position of relative safety in their dealings with the former Yugoslav republic’s rival governments and ethnic factions in this latest war. A handful of prominent Jews did, however, become political advocates for opposing factions.

For the most part, though, Jews sidelined themselves in the conflict among Serbs, Muslims and Croats--even when neutrality was sometimes as controversial as taking a side. In Sarajevo, they dished out 350 meals a day in a soup kitchen and tons of medicines annually in ad hoc pharmacies, all without regard for the beneficiaries’ religious or ethnic backgrounds.

“We are the only ethnic group with no territorial claim, with no claim on power,” said Finci, an energetic fireplug of a man who was among a select group of Bosnian political and religious leaders chosen to meet privately with President Clinton when he visited in January.

After such cooperation, however, Sarajevo’s Jews have entered into a thorny dispute with the government over homes belonging to Jews that have been seized by supporters of the ruling Muslim political party.

When Jewish families were evacuated in convoys in the fall of 1992, many signed legal contracts turning their properties over to the Jewish community association, which was to control the residences and screen any temporary occupants. But, association leaders say, the government put its own people into 272 apartments and now is refusing to honor the contracts.

With a peace accord formally ending the Bosnian war signed in December, some of the Jews who left are beginning to return. And they want their places back.

Moris Papo, 69, silver-haired with big, sad eyes, and his wife, Lea, 60, arrived in Sarajevo a couple of months ago after nearly four years living with their son in Germany, sleeping every night on a couch in his three-room apartment. They fully expected to regain their home, now occupied by a Muslim family unknown to them. Instead, they have wandered from bureaucracy to bureaucracy in an attempt to resolve the dispute. There are at least a dozen similar cases involving Jewish families.

“We invested every single penny we had in that apartment,” Papo said. “We are old and cannot go anywhere else. I was sure the agreements would be respected.”

Many of the disputed apartments are in prime, central locations, making them coveted acquisitions. And all were fully furnished; the departing Jews could take nothing with them and had expected to return.

The government is facing a housing nightmare, with thousands of refugees clamoring for a place to live and the notion of ownership a hotly contested issue. Still, Jewish community leaders say, most of their cases involve apartments taken not by refugees but by well-connected political or military families.

“A lot of our people would like to come back,” said Danilo Nikolic, another volunteer at La Benevolencia. “But we unfortunately don’t have an understanding with the state. Everyone is making promises with a lot of nice words, but on the ground, nothing.”

The possibility of the return of some of Bosnia’s exiled Jews provides one glimmer of hope for the community’s future. Another is the international support that has sustained La Benevolencia and sent visitors, like Rabbi Tutnauer and his wife, Margie, to help out. In addition to directing Passover ceremonies, Tutnauer, who served for two years at Los Angeles’ Sinai Temple, counseled and lectured while Margie Tutnauer conducted Hebrew classes during a three-week stay.

Her pupils ranged from an elderly man with a little knowledge of the biblical language to a Muslim university student who was curious. For most in the class, she had to explain the very basics of Jewish practice, starting with what to do and say in the Sabbath ritual.

Margie Tutnauer is among those worried about the destiny of Sarajevo’s Jews. “There will always be a Jewish community, but it’s an aging community, and it’s getting harder and harder,” she said. “If the war hadn’t come, with this huge exodus, what would have happened? . . . I don’t know. I have a lot of questions.”

Among her concerns is cultural identity. Take the Sabbath classes for children, held on Sundays to accommodate the local schedule. Last year, they were using a Christian Bible in the class, she said, and the sessions are still dedicated more to arts and crafts and guest speakers, such as psychologists specializing in war trauma, than to religious instruction. “It’s very nice,” she said. “But it’s not very Jewish.”

Finci defends the “hybrid” nature of the Jewish experience in Sarajevo. The assimilation that many Jews elsewhere dread was, he said, a necessary means of survival in Bosnia, one that fit in well with Sarajevo’s prewar tradition of multiethnic tolerance, mixed marriages and free spirit. “Some things are Jewish, some things are not so Jewish,” Finci said. “That’s the only way to be a Jew in Sarajevo. . . . Our biggest achievement is survival. Sometimes you do things that are not exactly in accordance with religious prescriptions.”

Eventually, he said, most visiting rabbis come around to understanding Sarajevo’s unique Judaism.

Finci is worried about the future of his people for other reasons.

The 3 1/2-year war and the peace pact that ended it have left Bosnia divided along ethnic lines--a Muslim-Croat federation on one side, a Bosnian Serb republic on the other. Increasingly, hard-line Muslim nationalists are gaining influence in their section of Bosnia, and they appear bent on creating their own Muslim state sandwiched between Serbian and Croatian counterparts.

The result, warned Finci, “will be three ghettos, without a future.”

“Maybe that is the way it has to work, but that won’t be Bosnia,” he said. “Serbs are taking care of Serbs, Muslims of Muslims, Croats of Croats. No one is taking care of Bosnia as a country.

“We Jews may be the last Bosnians.”