Building Bridges in the Balkans

...We are trying to help others realize that we all have to live with one another...

...Mostar officials say they would like to inaugurate the synagogue and the bridge simultaneously...

...We have never played up to either side...

...A youngish man in a striped polo shirt broke the seals, unlocked the box and opened it...

...Finci is also chairman of the 16-member Parliamentary Commission for the Implementation of a Constitutional Court Decision on Constituent People...

...Last September, for example, Bosnia's then Foreign Minister told a group of American Jews at a meeting in New York that he felt the indigenous Jewish community could act as a mediator amongthe various Bosnian parties, "since no one has a problem with the Jews.' "We are part of civil society attempting to help this country rebuild from scratch," says Jakob Finci, president of the Bosnian Jewish community...

...The truth is painful, particularly when we recognize that some of our guys were not just victims but perpetrators...

...Legend has it that shortly before the Germans entered Sarajevo in 1941, the Croatian director of the National Museum smuggled the Haggadah out to a Muslim professor who hid it in a remote mountain village...

...According to official statistics, the unemployment rate is 40 per cent and twothirds of Bosnia's citizens live below the poverty line...

...Construction of the three-story building will be financed by the municipal authorities, who have pledged to complete it next year...

...The bridge is being rebuilt under international auspices...

...The Macedonian Jewish community consists of only 200 people, but its leaders were called on to mediate between Muslim and Orthodox leaders in a recent dispute regarding an interfaith peace initiative...

...In the old market district, tourist shops sell coffee grinders and lamp bases made from spent shells, but tourists are few and business is bad...

...To one side stood a round table...

...Finci sees interfaith dialogue and cooperation as a means of healing the still open wounds inflicted by the war...

...With a slightly theatrical gesture, he slipped on a pair of clean white gloves and removed a package wrapped in white tissue paper that he placed on the table...

...Many of its undertakings, including a medical and home care project for 540 needy senior citizens, continue to cater to every group: Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Roma, even one Seventh Day Adventist...

...We audibly oohed and aahed as the gloved man, a staff member of the Sarajevo National Museum, turned over page after page to reveal the elegant Hebrew calligraphy, the brilliantly colored and gilded illustrations, the ancient wine stains, the centuries-old doodles of a child...

...The Jewish community issued a statement accusing them of working against the welfare of Bosnia as a whole, and Sarajevo officials as well as U.N...

...More recently, during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1992-95 Bosnian war, its whereabouts were a matter of anguished speculation, because the museum was bombarded and badly damaged...

...It required only minor repairs, primarily to the binding...

...The scene at the arrivals area of the airport reflected much that had occurred in the interim...

...He stopped, then beckoned again...

...A Haggadah sets out the ritual of the Passover Seder or ceremonial meal, and recounts the Israelites' slavery and Exodus from Egypt...

...In Macedonia, the former Yugoslav Republic now coping with tension and sporadic conflict between the Slav majority and ethnic Albanian rebels, the Jews have taken on a similar role...

...In hushed unison, we stepped into an underground vault—a cool, silent, windowless room lined with rows of numbered safety deposit boxes...

...It was the first time in several months that senior officials of Bosnia's three main religions came together, Finci reported...

...Mostar's Jewish community has a mere 45 members...

...On the table, like the bull's-eye in the center of a target, sat an ordinary blue metal lockbox sealed with old-fashioned wax...

...Mostar's Croat Mayor and Muslim Deputy Mayor also attended, as did a number of foreign diplomats...

...Another Jew heads a corresponding commission in the mainly Serbian Republika Srpska...

...A tall, thin woman waiting languidly for her luggage chain-smoked and wore a long, black leather coat, black stiletto high heels and black lipstick...

...Few outsiders other than the group I was with in the bank vault, a 10-member delegation from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, had seen the Haggadah since then...

...Her hair was dyed a flaming royal purple...

...I mean," she explains, "over there you have a boutique, over here you have a ruined building—and I am wearing power clothes and overseeing a project to open a branch of a foreign bank...

...It will be located just 100 yards from the site of the famous 16thcentury stone bridge that was destroyed by Croat mortar fire in November 1993...

...Sometimes I feel as if I'm in a movie," a friend tells me as we sip Rémy Martin in the cavernous lobby bar of the Holiday Inn, a ghastly yellow cube built for the 1984 Winter Olympics that stands across the street from the gutted government tower and bullet-pocked National Museum...

...Letter from Sarajevo Building Bridges in the Balkans By Ruth Ellen Gruber Sarajevo The suavely suited functionary of Sarajevo's Union Bank beckoned us to follow, and we did— through the lobby, along several corridors, and down several sets of narrow stairs...

...The carcasses of buildings destroyed in the siege loom over the city itself...

...The Jews are the pinch of salt...

...What we are trying to promote is a combination of the confessional and psychotherapy...

...Bosnia may be the first place I've ever been where it is positive to be a Jew," said George Rich, the Joint Distribution Committee board member leading the delegation I am accompanying...

...The Jewish cultural center that is to be part of the synagogue structure will be open three days a week to members of all faiths...

...Religious and ethnic tolerance may still be a pipe dream in Bosnia, but drama, symbolism and a sense of the unreal are inescapable...

...In early April, though, a few weeks before our visit, three international experts had examined it at the invitation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to assess its condition...

...The Haggadah survived unscathed, either in a bank vault or, some say, in secret private custody...

...This officially confirms the equality of ethnicities in the Bosnian Federation, the primarily Muslim and Croat part of Bosnia...

...With financial support from international organizations such as the Joint, it ran a soup kitchen, clinic, pharmacy, and other programs that served all citizens...

...UN Stabilization Force peacekeepers patrolled the hall in camouflage uniforms...

...And bread without salt i- tasteless...

...We hope it will be a wonderful meeting place where Christians, Muslims and Jews learn that we are all children of one God," says Finci...

...In late April Jakob Finci and other Bosnian Jews were joined by Muslim, Catholic and Serbian Orthodox religious leaders in the laying of a cornerstone for a new synagogue and Jewish cultural center in the southern city of Mostar...

...I used to travel to Sarajevo fairly regularly, but this was my first trip since the fighting broke out close to a decade ago...

...They respect our opinion, and this in turn raises the profile of the Jewish community...

...Cell phones bleeped...

...representatives went to the cemetery to show their solidarity...

...Owned by the National Museum since 1894, the 109-page manuscript has long been the symbol of Jewish presence in the Balkans...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a correspondent for the NL who covers Eastern Europe...

...Moreover, the image has been officially sanctioned...

...Established in the 16th century, the cemetery is situated on a hill overlooking the city...

...Jacques Klein, the head of Bosnia's United Nations mission, announced he would seek international support for the preservation project, "so that the Sarajevo Haggadah may survive as a lasting symbol of religious and ethnic tolerance in Bosnia...

...It is especially important that it is being built in a small town that was sharply divided between Muslims and Croats and heavily damaged during the war...

...Corruption is rife, and 60 per cent of young people say they would leave the city if they could...

...I certainly want to get out," declares a 17-year-old who sports a silver stud in his pierced lower lip...

...But questions about its safety became so intense that Bosnia's then-President Alija Izetbegovic displayed the Haggadah briefly at a community Seder in 1995, partly to dispel rumors that the government sold it to purchase weapons...

...We are conceived to be neutral from the start," Macedonian Jewish community leader Viktor Mizrachi told me...

...Its leader, Zoran Mandlbaum, became a local hero during the Bosnian war for his humanitarian work, and his efforts were crucial in getting the synagogue project off the ground...

...I always say that Bosnia is like bread," Finci confided...

...Thus, in the uneasy peace imposed by the Dayton Accords, Jews have maintained the image of honest broker...

...An 83-year-old woman tells me her monthly pension is the equivalent of $60...

...Several years ago an international restoration effort got under way, partly funded by the U, S. But last November teenage vandals overturned 30 tombstones...

...A young man selling CDs shrugs and shakes his head when I ask him how things are going...

...One reason appeared to be that the 700-odd Bosnian Jews were perceived as being outside the framework of the bloody ethnic conflict: not Serb, not Croat, not Muslim...

...Although the Muslims were certainly the biggest victims of the Bosnian war, they were not the only ones," he pointed out...

...Everyone is able to explain how his own ethnic group was a victim, but no one wants to accept responsibility...

...The Mostar synagogue is an important symbol of new life—not just for Jews, but for the whole country," Finci contends...

...Substantial damage was done in the fighting, and the grounds were subsequently mined...

...The Serbs, the Bosniaks [Muslims] and the Croats are the water, yeast and flour...

...Throughout the war, the Jewish social welfare organization, La Benevolencija, was highly respected as a major conduit of nonsectarian humanitarian aid...

...During the '92 siege the Serbs set up heavy weapons units there...

...He is therefore highly active in a South Africastyle Truth and Reconciliation initiative involving Muslim, Serbian Orthodox, Catholic and Jewish leaders...

...The symbolism accorded the Sarajevo Haggadah extends in many ways to the local Jewish community, and to its cemetery...

...They found the book had suffered remarkably little damage during six centuries of conflict and upheaval...

...This one, handwritten and illustrated in northern Spain in the 14th century, was brought to Sarajevo after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492...

...Big Muslim families greeted returning émigrés with flowers and kisses...

...Slowly, he unpeeled the paper and there it was, the famous Sarajevo Haggadah, considered one of the world's most precious books...