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Hello, welcome to the new books network. I am your host, Ari Barbilat. I am blessed and honored to be in dialogue today with Dr. Francine Friedman.
We will be discussing her new book, Like Salt for Bread, the Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina, published by Brill in 2022. Francine is a merits-up professor of political science at Ball State University in Indiana. Francine, it's an honor to be communicating with you today. How kind of you?
Thank you. Thank you. To begin, what inspired you to write this book? What would you like readers to take away from it?
Well, that could take the whole hour, but I'll keep it brief. When I was invited to, sorry, Ivo to a conference right after the Bosnian War in 1997, I made a courtesy call to the synagogue slash Jewish Community Center there. And I had what was scheduled to be a 15-minute meeting with the President of the Bosnian Jewish Community, Yakuza Finci. It turned out to be a two-hour meeting because he told me stories about what the Bosnian Jewish community had done during the Bosnian War that was so important to the city of, sorry, Ivo under siege.
It was the longest siege in modern history and there was great danger to everyone in the city. So what fascinated me was that for one of the few times in history, the Bosnian, the Jews of the city were not a target of anyone. As a matter of fact, they were permitted to leave the city, which Serbs, Croats and Muslims were not. So some of the Jewish women and children, elderly and sick, did leave.
But some of the people stayed, about 500 of them stayed because this was their city. And not only did they stay, but they use their contacts with the American Joint Distribution Committee, the JDC, to import food and medicines and other things into sorry, Ivo, which they shared with their Serbs, Croats and Muslim neighbors. And this was really an untold story and I thought that it should be told. It wasn't really my field, but I decided to tell the story and I did.
And as I pursued the research, I became more and more astounded and frankly enamored with the community, with the history of the community, both from the time that they first came to Bosnia, after the expulsion from Spain, the sardine came there after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, all the way up to the present. So I spent about 23 summers in sorry Ivo doing the research. Can you explain your book's central message? Yeah, there are a couple, but the one that really wanted to get across is that a small group of people, even an ethnic minority if you will, can sometimes make a significant difference in the international arena or in their own country.
And this is something we kind of sort of forget in this era of conflict all over the place, that sometimes a small group of very determined people determined to do good can make a difference. What contribution does your book make to existing scholarship? Can you situate your book vis-a-vis current academic literature in the field, especially that of scholars such as Aaron Rodriguez and Esther Ben-Basa? Well, first of all, I believe that my book is the first English language treatment of the Bosnian Jewish community as a whole.
So I started all the way back from almost biblical times all the way to, in fact, tomorrow. And I don't think that there is another book about this topic that does that. Aaron Rodriguez and Esther Ben-Basa did a lot of work on Sephardic Jewry. Very, very excellent work and I relied on some of their research for my book.
But my book also deals with the Ashkenazim, who did come a little bit later into Bosnian, actually in the 19th century. But the two communities more or less meshed right before the Holocaust and their fate was bound together. And there was no difference really between the Sthardim and the Ashkenazim. After that time, except, you know, culturally, there were some differences, but their fate was pretty much the same.
Why did you choose the title like salt for bread? I heard the analogy of the Bosnian Jews as salt in bread. And I can tell you just very briefly how it was explained. If you want to create a, just an average loaf of bread, you need flour, yeast, and eggs or something like that.
And there you get your bread. And it's very utilitarian. And if you add a pinch of salt, you get flavor. So if you substitute Serbs, Croats and Muslims for the standard ingredients for bread and then put a little pinch of salt, which is the Jewish component, you get a delicious, you get a delicious bread.
And furthermore, the salt spreads throughout the bread, just like the Jews spread throughout the land in Bosnia, as well as in every facet of life in society, in the society of Bosnia. So that's why I chose that title. What was the status of Jews in the Kingdom of the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs? How were Bosnian Jews impacted by the creation of the state of Yugoslavia to begin with?
Well, they actually welcomed it. There were several proclamations made by the Bosnian Jewish community saying that they welcomed the creation. It's not that their situation changed all that much because there wasn't a lot of anti-Semitic infestations before then. But what happened during the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which it became in 1929, was their situation, their status was regularized by a 1929 law that recognized the community, gave them certain rights on paper, which they had more or less been able to realize beforehand, but this gave them a legal status.
So the Bosnian Jews throughout Yugoslavia welcomed this new legal structure. What contribution did Bosnian and Yugoslav Jews make to the international brigades during the Spanish Civil War? What role did they play in Republican forces? How did they perceive General Francisco Franco?
Well, that's kind of an interesting story too. A lot of progressive youths from Bosnia, from Yugoslavia, actually from various places, I think, also from the United States, headed to Spain to fight against the fascists. But what's interesting about the Bosnian situation is that the Sfardine, who spoke Judeo Español, which is, today we call it Badino. But Judeo Español was Cervantes era Spanish.
So it had stayed in a purer form and Spanish Spanish, Spanish from Spain, had moved on into more modern linguistics, but they could understand each other. So the Sfardine from Bosnia served as translators and were kind of a bridge between other Yugoslavs, the Serb-Ocoration speakers and the Spaniards that they were assisting. So it's a very interesting time period. The other thing that the Yugoslav Jews that was important about their service in the Spanish Civil War was once it was over, those that made it out alive came back to Yugoslavia.
And so, shortly thereafter, their services were very useful in resisting the fascists in Yugoslavia. So these battle-tested Yugoslav Jews, as well as other Yugoslavs, formed a cadre, a very important cadre, that helped the partisans, especially in the early part of the war, to resist the fascists. So a very interesting time period for Bosnian Jews, as well as other Yugoslavs. What was the character of Germany's relationship with Yugoslavia during the 1930s before 1939?
Germany was already plotting how Europe would be fashioned after they occupied all of Europe. And Yugoslavia would, of course, be part of Germany's sphere of influence. But Yugoslavia was not very advanced industrially. So Yugoslavia was supposed to be kind of a breadbasket and also a lumber producer, because Bosnia, especially, had lots of trees.
And so Bosnia was seen, Yugoslavia, but especially Bosnia was seen as a breadbasket, as raw materials supplier, and as a market for Germany's finished goods. So in effect, Yugoslavia was supposed to be subordinate to Germany's needs. Does that answer the question? Very much.
Okay. And one other thing that's important is that at first, Germany said to Yugoslavia that if it didn't make any problems, you know, agreed to to Germany's terms, Yugoslavia would be considered a neutral. And so the Yugoslav royal house decided on that path didn't work so well, but that was the path that they that was a decision they made. What was life like in Sarajevo during World War II?
My understanding is that it was absolutely miserable for everyone. Of course, it was more miserable for the Jews who were first deprived of all of their property and their capability of participating in society. And then they were transported to the camps to a Cinevots and other concentration camps. But even for the population as a whole, it was miserable because frankly, the rulers of the independent state of Croatia, which had captured and integrated Bosnia within its borders.
And their name was the Ustasha. They were terrible administrators. So life was miserable. The Ustasha were greedy and, you know, took as much that their their main goal was to steal whatever they could.
And the rest of the population was just really in bad straits and one of the winters. I think it was the winter of 1942 was one of the coldest on record. So the Jews in the concentration camps were freezing to death. And also were the Sedalia, which is the name the name of the population gives themselves and they were cutting up.
They were burning furniture and books and things like that, just to stay warm. It was miserable. What were the similarities and differences between Sephardi and Ashkenazi suffering among Bosnia and Jewry in the Holocaust? In the case of Bosnia, there was no difference whatsoever.
A Jew was a Jew and they made no distinction between Sephardi and Ashkenazi. So they suffered alike. As I mentioned, there was a difference in social norms and culture during the interwar period between World War I and World War II that they kept themselves, each community kept itself to itself. And the fascists came in.
All the differences were wiped out and it was the community tried to help however they could each other. One interesting factoid though that I should mention is that there was one distinction made between the Ashkenazi and the Sephardi and that was that each of them had its own separate trustee, which was called Pavieranek, which was the liaison between the community and the Ustascha administration. So there was one Pavieranek for the Sephardi community and one for the Ashkenazi community. But the suffering was the same.
What role did Pavieranitsi play? How did Pavieranitsi emerge? And can you compare and contrast the Pavieranitsi in the Balkans with other forms of collaboration during the Holocaust elsewhere in Europe? Well, first of all, the Pavieranitsi were not Jewish.
So there was, yeah, right. So there was, they weren't collaborate. The Jews weren't collaborators, the Pavieranitsi, who were Muslims, Catholics, and occasionally Hungarian or Albanian or somebody. They came about as trustees on behalf of the Ustascha government to take over on behalf of the government, all of the Jewish businesses and to keep them running if they were making a profit or keep them running until the state nationalized them.
So the Pavieranitsi just walked into Jewish businesses and took them over. And of course, the Jews were sent to the camps pretty much. Now, I mentioned that the, each of the Jewish communities, the Ashkenazi and the Svarim, had its own Pavieranek. So there was, which is the singular of Pavieranitsi.
So each of them had their own trustee, which again was a liaison with the administration. Other cultural and social institutions, if they were large enough, and if they had any assets, also had a Pavieranek. And this was a way for the Ustascha, the fascist government to steal all of the assets of the Jews. How did Antepavilic ascend to power?
What were the origins of the Ustascha movements? And can you describe Pavilic's anti-Semitic policies? Well, that in itself is all the brief. Antepavilic was a Croatian lawyer who, when the kingdom of the Serbskorat and Slovenes became the kingdom of Yugoslavia because there was a royal coup, the king took over.
And in fact, all of the functioning of government, there was no parliament for a while, etc. And the king and the most of the administrators were Serbian. So the Croats, the radical Croats, said the heck with this, and they left, they went to Italy and supported by Mussolini for a while. And they invaded a radical group called the Ustascha.
And Antepavilic was the leader. And one of the seminal ideals of the Ustascha was anti-Semitism. And we see this happening. We see this playing out when Pavilic came back to Croatia, when the Germans had invaded Yugoslavia, he came back to Croatia, was declared pogodnik, which means leader, and immediately started sending out declarations against the Jews.
And there were laws that Jews couldn't walk on the sidewalk, they couldn't visit parks, they couldn't go to movies anymore, they had to register their businesses, they had to wear a yellow star of some kind of, sometimes it was metal, sometimes it was cloth, etc, etc, etc. So their lives became more and more constrained. And so the idea was anti-Semitism on the move, and finally he created the concentration camps and sent the Jews there. And 90% almost of the Jews of Bosnia, of Croatia, into Croatia, into the independent state of Croatia.
How did Bosnia's Muslims respond to the creation of the independent state of Croatia? And how did they respond to Pavilic, and how did Pavilic treat Muslims in Bosnia? Yeah, okay, well, there's no simple answer to that, it's a very complex question, because not all Muslims did the same thing. A lot of Muslims, actually, maybe not immediately, but eventually went into the partisans to resist the fascists.
But some Muslims, some Bosnian Muslims, thought that when Pavvitch came in, he made all sorts of promises that the Muslims were, in effect, the cream of Croatian life, and they would be treated well. And indeed some Croatian elites became high members of the government. But after a while it became pretty obvious that the Ustascha didn't know how to govern. And interestingly, some Muslim elites in Bosnia wrote a letter to Hitler and asked if Hitler could declare Bosnia a German protectorate and get rid of the Ustascha, who were criminals and didn't know how to run the state to save their lives.
That didn't go anywhere. But so that's why I say it's very complex how the Bosnian Muslims responded to this. A lot of them went to the partisans. Some of them were collaborators, and also, by the way, some with the instigation of Amin al-Husaini from Jerusalem, the Grand Muftea Jerusalem, who was a good friend of Hitler's, some of them were part of an SS group that was supposed to be only Muslim, but was in the unmixed Croatian in Muslim.
And without telling the whole story, because that could take a long time, they were taken to France to train, which went against what they were promised. They were promised that they would stay in Bosnia and defend their homes, but they were taken to France to train, and they rebelled against that they killed some German officers, and they rebelled. This was the only rebellion of SS troops against Germany, and so it's a very interesting chapter. So anyway, the bottom line of all of this is that the Muslims had differential responses to Pavlitch, who made very flowery statements about how important the Muslims were to the Croats.
And as a matter of fact, the Muslims in his view were Catholics who had converted to Islam a long time ago, but they were still the cream of Croatia. Not everybody bought that, but... Can you describe the fate of Jews sent to Jakovó? Yeah, that was women and children.
They died. They were maltreated, underfed, there was disease. One of the most poignant things that I did when I was in Bosnia every year, the Bosnian Jewish community went to Jakovó, which is in Croatia, to commemorate that horrible place, because there's a cemetery there that has markers with the actual names of the women and children who died. This is one of the, if not the only, one of the few Holocaust era cemeteries that actually you can identify the graves of the people.
Most of the women and children were from Sarajevo, by the way, so it's very close to their hearts. But when you look at the cemetery, there's a little area in front for the children, the children from one month old to, you know, three, one year old, something like that. I mean, it's so painful to see. If we move from the Holocaust to a different atrocity situation facing the Jews of Sarajevo, I'd be curious if I could ask you to comment on the events recorded in the Sarajevo Maguilla.
What is the Sarajevo Maguilla? What events does it commemorate? Can you describe those events and the main protagonist and antagonists in that episode? I can.
We're moving back in history now, but this is also very closely tied to the Bosnian Jews, as well as in particular the Sarajevo Jews. This was an attempt, first of all, as you know, a Maguilla is a scroll. And this particular incident that I'll tell you about is somewhat likened to the scroll of Esther in the Bible. So because this was an attempt by a non-Jew to massacre Jews.
But it's got an interesting twist, so I'll tell it very briefly. There was a Jewish, reputedly a Jewish drunkard named Moshe Kavilo. I think that's how it's pronounced, who decided to convert to Islam. And he became a member of the Dervish, small sect of Muslims.
But he was a troublemaker, and he tried to get the Jews in trouble with the Ottoman Pasha of that area. The Pasha didn't play along with that and actually executed Moshe Kavilo, who became a Dervish, who had become a Dervish. And some of the Dervishes were really mad about this, but there was nothing they could do about it until a new Pasha came along who was also a Dervish. And they told him about this situation, and he decided to get back at the Sarajevo Jews.
So he captured the rabbi Moshe Donon, and ten other elders of the community put them in prison and said you have to pay a ransom. And it was a huge ransom that the community couldn't possibly meet. And he said that if they didn't pay the ransom, they would die. And so a member of the Sarajevo Jewish community talked to some Bosnian Muslims and told them what was going on.
And they said this will not happen. And so a bunch of Bosnian Muslims from Sarajevo went to the Pasha's palace and freed the rabbi and sent a letter to the Sultan telling what had happened and complaining about this Pasha. And so here are Bosnian Muslims freeing Jewish, their Jewish neighbors. And from somebody who wanted to kill the Jews.
So that's where the parallel is with the scroll of Esther. So the reason why it's so special, of course, the Jews were saved, but also the fact that Muslims would help the Jews escape from another Muslim who was perpetrating evil is very interesting. Of course, as I mentioned in the book, there are some possible other political reasons that the Muslims took this action, but for our purposes, what's interesting is how they saved their neighbors. And this gives us a sneaky peak into what's going to happen about a century later when Jews were saving Muslims, you know, and serves in Croats later on during the Bosnian war.
But that's what's important. And so every year, the Bosnian Jews, except for during COVID, Bosnian Jews go to the grave of the rabbi, which is in Stolots near Stolots city in Bosnia. And say a prayer and drink wine and commemorate this glorious situation that were the Jews of sorry, but were saved. Wow.
How did Joseph Tito rise to power and how did he remember or think about the Jewish contribution to the partisan movement? Well, Tito was a communist. It's kind of murky how I think how he came to power. I think he took over when his predecessor in the mid 1930s was called back to to the Soviet Union and kind of disappeared, but Tito was a party man.
And he followed the the Stalinist prescriptions and he became the head of the Communist Party. And when the fascists when the Germans invaded the communists were finally given the okay by the Soviet Union to go to the woods and and. Rebel against the fascist invasion. Remember in 1939, there was a secret agreement between the Germans and the Soviets, the Molotov-Rippantrop agreement.
And so it wasn't a given that communist would resist. But once they were given the okay by Stalin, Tito went to the woods with with the partisans at first mostly serves, but then they kept the from their mountain hideouts they kept the propaganda coming out that the partisans welcome serves Muslims, Roma, gypsies, Jews, everybody to fight against the aggressor. And this was this was what happened. People eventually flocked to the partisans and Tito, the Tito in his administration mostly did not determine who was what religion or national group just anybody who would fight was They were all welcomed.
There was almost no anti-Semitism. There were actually several Jewish heroes of, which is, you know, the highest honors. Heroes of the of the Yugoslavia peoples are I'm blocking on what they would call, but there were several heroes who received the highest honors. They were honored as Yugoslavs.
So, so they weren't discriminated against in that way. How was yes, and of that's remembered in Tito's Yugoslavia kind of not very much when when the partisans were winning the war, the Ustasha blew up the son of that's and there's almost nothing left except a monument, which I understand Tito never visited. There's almost nothing left there to commemorate what happened there. It wasn't only Jews that were murdered there, but most of the Jews who were murdered were murdered there.
After the war, the commemorations were for Yugoslavs who were victims of the fascists, not Jews, not, you know, the Holocaust was recognized, but it wasn't given too much pride of place. How did Bosnia's Jews fare under communism? How did communist Yugoslavia treat Jews in comparison and contrast with other Eastern European countries? Jews could under under Tito's Yugoslavia, under socialist Yugoslavia, Jews could practice their religion.
But if you were a religious Jew, you would not belong to the Communist Party. You wouldn't rise to to high level in any facet of society. So, but there was no, I was not able to find any over to anti-Semitism to speak up. Jews rose, Jews who were in the Communist Party rose to very high levels, or could rise to very high levels.
And Jewish heroes that I talked about became, I don't know, the head of the movie producing area or, you know, various other heads of factories. But Jews who were religious didn't have a really great career trajectory, but they were not punished for being Jews. But frankly, this was the same for every religion, people from every religion because the churches during World War II did not distinguish themselves very positively. I mean, there were a lot of Catholics, just for example, who supported the Ustashe who strapped on a gun and killed people.
There were even Catholic priests who were the heads of concentration camps. And the Orthodox, some of the Orthodox priests were very supportive of another rebellious group called the Chetniks, which killed people that they didn't like also. So, Communist Yugoslavia did not really value religion at all. And the people who survived the war, they really didn't value the churches that much because they were, most of them were implicated in collaboration as a collaborationism.
On this very note, there's a quote in the book on page 643, where your write is follows in the 1980s and 90s, both Serbian and Croatian nationalists rejected the Titoist regime's assignment of guilt for the crimes committed for the crime attributed to their ethnic group during World War II. And so, the situation nationalists began to embrace a more positive reinterpretation of the Ustashe, including genocide denial. Similarly, Serbian nationalists rejected the charge of Serbian hegemony in the interwar Uislav Kingdom. Can you elucidate on what you are alluding to?
What I had just described about the rejection of religion was maintained while Tito was alive in 1980. He died and thereafter nationalism rose slowly, but inexorably. And I should mention that most serves are Orthodox, most pro-roats are Catholic and Muslims are Muslim. There's a distinction between the nationalists and the nation of Muslims and the religion of Muslims.
But anyway, so under Tito, the religious part of each of these groups was subordinated. But after Tito died, we see the nationalists reinvigorating their national religious connection. And as they did that, they looked back at World War II and said, Hey, that's not the narrative that we want to portray. So the Catholics tied to the Ustashe.
That was a really negative thing. So they started to say, Well, the Ustashe did do some bad things. But they weren't, they were nationalists. This was a nationalist movement.
And you know, there were some bad apples, but really they were protecting the Croatian nation. The, the Serb said that the Serbian nation was getting kind of a bad reputation from being called dominating interwar Uislavia. And they really weren't like that. It was a positive time for everybody.
And so, as a result, there was a lot of denial of Ustashe crimes during World War II of Chetnik or Serbian crimes during World War II of Muslim crimes during World War II. And there was an attempt to put more positive spin on this period and these people, these groups during this period. And so, so the service were rejecting the charge of Serbian hegemony. The the Croats were saying, Well, some people died in the But really we didn't kill them.
You know, Croats were not nearly as as bloodthirsty as they've been painted, etc. So this was a time of backfilling and trying to give a different narrative, a more positive narrative. I wasn't Jewish religious life conducted in communist Uislavia. If you wanted to, you could go to the synagogue.
There, there wasn't a rabbi after, I forget when he died, but the rabbi and Sarajevo passed away and I think in the I think in the 60s or 70s and after that, there wasn't a rabbi. There was lay leadership and there were some people who knew the prayers. They could, they could leave the congregation in prayer. And so there was a some religious life, but largely Jewish life was social and cultural during this time.
So they kept their community together by, by celebrating the holidays, by, you know, having parties or commemorations or things like that, by, by cultural manifestations of Jewish life, things like that that wouldn't unduly upset the, the administration, the communist administration. We earlier on discussed the Sarajevo, McGilla, I'd be curious if you could tell us about the Sarajevo, Haggadah. What was the Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Haggadah? Well, this is, this is one of the reasons why it was hard for me to stop writing this book when I did, because there's so many interesting things that happened to the Bosnian Jews and that they have done.
Well, but the Sarajevo, Haggadah was, it's, it's origins are a little bit murky. It was, it's a Haggadah, which is a book used in Passover during the Passover Seder. It may have been created in the, I'm going to say maybe the 14th century in Spain and it's, it's beautiful book. It's illuminated, very colorful.
It may have been a wedding gift to a family, maybe the Elezars, you know, like I said, it's kind of there are all sorts of stories about it. Whatever it was, it left with the family probably during the expulsion from Spain in 1492 and made its way. I don't know how to the Balkans and a Jewish family by the name of Cohen tried to sell it and tried to sell it, I think, to the Sarajevo Jewish community, which couldn't afford it. So the rabbi of the Jewish community at that time alerted the museum that was under Austrian, Austro-Hungarian or Austrian administration and they bought it.
So what's, what's really important to understand about the Sarajevo Haggadah is that it's considered an invaluable, priceless book, but it's a Jewish book, but it was never owned by the Jews of Bosnia. It's tied to them, but it was never owned by them. So it's owned and controlled by the state. And what's, what's even more interesting is that everyone in Bosnia, especially in Sarajevo, values this book as a Bosnian symbol, even though it's a Jewish book.
Who, can you tell us about Ivan Cherysnysh? What was the Cherysnysh list? Okay, you pronounced it very well. Thank you.
Ivan Cherysnysh was the president of the Bosnian Jewish community when the Bosnian war broke out. And I mentioned, I think that the Bosnian Jews played a really unbelievably positive role during the Bosnian war, helping their neighbors. However, they could. They imported food.
40% of the medicine, I understand in Sarajevo during the war was provided by the Jews. They even had their own pharmacy that where you could go. If you had a doctor's prescription, if you could get through the snipers to the pharmacy, actually there were three pharmacies in different places that the Jews provided goods for. But if you could get to one of them and you produced a prescription, you could have medicine for free.
So that was one of the things that the Jewish community provided to Sarajevo. But specifically the Cherysnysh list was a product of a very important thing that the Bosnian Jews did for their Sarajevo neighbors and that was the convoys. The Bosnian Jews were not at war and they were allowed to leave via these convoys that were sponsored by the JDC. The Jews made up the ones who left made up only a third of the people who went out on the convoys and the Cherysnysh list was made up of Serbs, Croats and Muslims who were at risk or ill.
And they were allowed to go out on the convoys and to get onto the list was not easy because the list had to be okayed by the Serbs, by the Muslims and by the Croats, all of whom were at war. So if somebody on that list was not going to be permitted to leave by, for example, if a Serb was on the list and a Croat and the Croat commander didn't want to give permission. They had to be cut from the list and people were very anxious to get on this list and get the heck out of Sarajevo because the siege was horrendous. I wasn't there, but I've read many memoirs about it and I've spoken to people who went through it and it was horrendous.
People were subject to sniper fire from the Jewish cemetery, no less, which was extraordinarily painful to the Jewish community. Cherysnysh's grandfather, I think, was his grave was in the front row and it was part of a sniper's nest. So people really wanted to get out of the siege and one of the few ways that they could do it was through the Jewish convoys and that was the Cherysnysh list. What role did the Joint Distribution Committee play in the Bosnian War?
Like I said, they provided medicine, they provided food, they provided the convoys, which were, by the way, very dangerous because each convoy had to pass through 30-some different checkpoints. And Ivan told me one time that there was a very nasty paramilitary group that hit him on his cheek, maybe both cheeks, with a gun barrel, which broke his jaw and both jaws and he actually had to have them surgically taken care of. And it was very dangerous, but the JDC sponsored these convoys by bus and by car, by truck, etc. They provided money.
There were many friends of the Bosnian Jews, they called them friends of Robin Evelyncy, which we haven't talked about yet, but that was the Sada Yevo organization that was a liaison with the JDC. They provided a lot of cash so that things could be bought for the people that were suffering in Sada Yevo. So the JDC played a very important role. They had an office in split in Pro-Asia and that was a lot of people went to split and were taken care of by the JDC and other sponsors.
Speaking of La Bonifilencia, can you tell us about its history and its origins? And can you also kindly tell us about how it came to be re-established, having existed earlier on in the century? How was its response to the Bosnian Civil War, similar in different from its responses to other crises in the Balkans in its earlier incarnation? Well, that could be a whole book in itself.
So I'll try and make it short. La Bonifilencia was first created by Sardim in, I think it's 1892, to be an educational slash humanitarian organization, particularly interestingly, it was particularly formed to help young people who were trying to get into a trade. And they were mainly poor, Sardim were mainly poor. And so this was to help young people get into a trade by educating them at least a little, because they didn't have the kind of educational resources back in the late 19th century that we have now.
And to buy them the kinds of clothing and tools and things that they needed to go into these trades. But as time went on, La Bonifilencia started to focus more on education, started to give support to cultural resources. And so it was a very important thing to do to make sure that the country was able to go into cultural and other kinds of initiatives. And it was, I wish I had time to go into, you know, there's a large section in the book about things that La Bonifilencia did for the Bosnian community and how it was recognized even by the resource for Yugoslavia, much less for Bosnia.
But anyway, as time went on, until World War II, La Bonifilencia was exceedingly positive cultural, educational, and support organization. Of course, when World War II came, most of people were killed. And after World War II, La Bonifilencia was not permitted, like other social organizations with a religious or national tie was not permitted to reform, because the Communist Party would take care of all of those, the things that La Bonifilencia would do. And so when Yugoslavia began to collapse, organizations like La Bonifilencia were allowed to reform.
And indeed, they did. And La Bonifilencia was just gearing up to be a nice Jewish humanitarian educational society and boom, all of a sudden came the war. And became, as I mentioned before, a conduit for an liaison with the JDC and other Jewish organizations. And under La Bonifilencia, I have in my book, an organizational chart, La Bonifilencia sponsored a radio station, a post office, a people's kitchen that could make it to the Jewish center, through all the sniper fire, they could get a meal there for free.
And all sorts of other initiatives, cultural initiatives, they ran cultural initiatives, even under rifle fire and sniper fire. And so La Bonifilencia grew to be this major organization that was run by Jews, but was welcoming other people, for example, into their pharmacy and into their home health care system. So it was Jewish, Jewish sponsored, but it welcome volunteers from all nations and religions. There's a lot more that I could say about it, but I'm sure.
Sure. Can you tell the story of the people's kitchen in Sarajevo during the war? Yeah, that's pretty interesting too. That's one of the initiatives of La Bonifilencia, a restaurant tour named Josef Abenon with the nickname of Sitzgoh.
What a character. He's a real character. Of course, you couldn't run a restaurant during the war. So he became the chef at the Jewish center and firewood and electricity and all of those things were at a premium.
So he got himself a big pot and used to throw whatever food he could and make healthy meals for whoever, like I said, could get there and people could, they could have a meal and if they could bring something along with them, they could have extra food that they could take home with them. So it was called a people's kitchen and it was run freely by the Jewish community and Sitzgoh, as far as I know, I haven't been to Sarajevo in the last since COVID, but as far as I know, he's still the head of the restaurant. Now, of course, they charge a little bit of money for the for meals during the war. It was free, but not a lot.
I mean, it's a really good food, delicious food. Wow. So it was Bohoretta. How did Bohoretta come into existence?
Bohoretta was a women's group under this rubric and during during the communist era, there was a women's section in the Jewish community that took care of parties and putting together cultural events. When the war began, this women's section morphed into still the women's section, but they took the name Bohoretta to honor a pre World War II author and playwright Laura Papa Bohoretta. Bohoretta, by the way, is a name given to the first born. It's Bohore is a male first born, Bohoretta is a female first born.
That's what I understand. So anyway, her name was Laura Papa, but it was Laura Papa Bohoretta. And so they took this name and they became really one of the driving engines for the Jewish community during the war. They created a visiting doctors and nurses section.
So anybody with medical training, risking life in them under a sniper fire and everything would go to people's apartments if they couldn't get out and come to either the pharmacy or to they ran a clinic, the physician at the clinic was a Muslim man. And there was a Serbian Orthodox dentist. Anyway, all of these initiatives, the women ran including a school. So they were still children under siege.
So they invited Jewish children to come to school, to some kind of school. There was some religion, you know, talking about holidays and everything, but just to keep them, you know, from being afraid of something, but the Jewish children wanted to bring their friends, service girls and Muslims, and they accepted them. So this would, I remember interviewing Sonia Elazar, who was the head of Bohoretta and also the principal of the school. And she said that one time they had a Purim show where they were there.
And so there was, I think a Muslim was played the hero and a Serbian girl, I think maybe was Queen Esther and the Jewish boy was the villain. So everybody was able to participate and it mitigated the fear of what was going on outside. And then one more thing, why is he noteworthy? Okay, very interesting character.
I never met him. But I heard tales about him. He was a Swedish, I think it was a Swedish violinist who came to stand with the community, but they didn't need a violinist. So he had a very valuable commodity.
It was a United Nations High Commission for Refugees card, a UNHCR card, identity card that let him fly in and out of Sarajevo. So they said, we don't need you to teach violin, but how would you like to be our mailman? And so apparently he took letters in and out of Sarajevo, sometimes two or three times a day, I understand. And so, you know, that all sorts of interesting things happen during the war.
All sorts of people volunteered to do sorts of interesting things that were needed by the people of Sarajevo. How was COVID-19 handled in Bosnia? What impact did it have on Bosnia and Herzovina in general and on Bosnia and Jews in particular? I'm led to believe that Bosnia had one of the lowest vaccination rates in Europe for a long time.
And COVID really killed them, really did a job on Bosnia. It also, unfortunately, did a job on the Bosnian Jewish community, the the Cantor, the longtime Cantor David Comfy passed away around the same time as his brother-in-law. The wife of the president of the Sarajevo Jewish community passed away. Almost everybody had some form of COVID, whether it was light or heavy.
But I don't have figures, but I'm led to believe that it really decimated the community. It was not kind to the Jewish community. How have Jews in contemporary Bosnia dealt with anti-Semitism? Unfortunately, that's something that has arisen far more recently than ever before in the history of the Jews in Bosnia.
Some people think it's because of the influx of radical Muslims coming into into Bosnia. And let me put that into context. Some radical Muslims came in to fight on the Muslim side during the Bosnian war, and some of them didn't leave. Most of them left, some of them didn't leave.
They married Bosnian women in state. And also, Bosnia is the European country with a Muslim plurality that is closest to Western Europe. And so it's seen as kind of, I think, I'm speculating here. And so it's kind of a potential entry point to Europe.
So when I was in Bosnia, I spent many summers in Bosnia, and I saw more and more evidence of Islam, a more conservative Islam in the streets, even the way the women dressed in everything. When I first got there, there was very little evidence of that, because the Bosnian Muslims are of the Hanafi right, most of them, which is a very liberal Muslim right. But now there are more and more people of more conservative bent coming in and influencing the youth there. And so the tensions in the Middle East are now starting to make their way into Bosnia.
And there's a lot of anti-Jewish feeling. And there are more and more anti-Jewish demonstrations. I personally saw graffiti that was anti-Jewish. And this was maybe a decade ago.
I was just walking along the street and I saw Swastika. I also saw Swastika equals a Jewish star. So fascism and Judaism were being equated. And it was very painful to see because Bosnia has such a long history of mutual tolerance among the various religious groups and national groups.
And it's very painful to see that things are slowly changing. Have Bosnia and Holocaust survivors received any form of reparations? And how have Jews in the Balkans dealt with the question of plunder Jewish property during the Holocaust? It took a while I understand for Bosnian Jews to actually get money from the claims court.
But I think they are now. So they're like other Jews in Europe. Getting their property back. And by the way, at one time I understand something like, I don't know, like 25% or more of Sarajevo was in Jewish hands.
The problem is that the people in charge, the administration, doesn't have a plan for returning property that was stolen, literally stolen from the Jews during the Holocaust. And the reason is, was explained to me partially by the former prime minister, the wartime prime minister of Bosnia, who said that, well, yeah, it is a problem. The Jews were all of their property, all of their businesses, all of their artwork, all of their money was stolen. But we have to worry now about the people, the refugees and the displaced people from the Bosnian war.
And so we have to give them places to live. So I asked him, you know, do you have any problem with giving or even selling property that really belongs to somebody else? And he said, well, this is a problem that needs to be resolved. But right now, we have other things on our list.
So Bosnia is making little to no progress in restitution or reparations. Shane, can you describe your personal visit to Bosnia? I heard so if you not that inspired your interest in the topic that inspired this work. Oh, how long do you have?
Whatever you have available. Well, as I said, I spoke with Yaku Finsey 20 some years ago, and I was just inspired by the fact that this very small group of people, number one, loved their city, loved their country so much that even though it was at war and they had a chance to leave, they suddenly stayed to help their city to be a part of its reconstruction. So that was, that inspired me to look deeper into the, to this, this group and where they came from. I mean, they didn't just drop out of the sky.
So that made me want to go back and see where they came from. And then I discovered that, you know, that large group of them for that time came from Spain. And then the Ashmanazim came with the Austro-Hungarians after Austrian-Hungary occupied Bosnia in 1878. And it just inspired me to see how a small group of people became such an integral part of their country and a valued part of their country and they were Jews.
And like I said, I think previously Jews throughout history have not really fared very well. And this was a, this was counter to Jewish history because this was a very positive, not mostly positive experience for the Jews except of course for World War II. And things are getting a little rocky right now. Of course, they're getting rocky all over the world, but also for the for the Bosnian Jews.
So that's what inspired me to look more deeply into this community. And I'm so glad that I did that there are the people that I met there were simply lovely, very welcoming. And I have to say that I'm an Ohio girl. I was born a Buckeye and I hadn't done too much world travel.
And when I, when I got to Sarajevo, I was shocked at how much I had in common with some of the people there. Certainly they had very interesting and exotic things in certain respects, but my gosh, we had so many of the same interests and reactions to things. And some of my dearest friends still reside there and I miss them very much. I've been very much covered destroyed my capability of going there for several years.
So I, they're very lovely inspiring community and I'm so glad that by accident I discovered them. What a miracle in hindsight. Really, really. As we bring our dialogue to a close.
Would you be kind enough to tell us what you're working on next as your current project? What you're working on now is your subsequent project. Well, once I once I finished the book, I let me say that I really didn't want to finish the book. It's more than 900 pages and I really wanted to keep going.
But it was time and I think I almost exceeded the binding capabilities of my publisher. But there were some things that I thought maybe that I would want to go deeper into one of them is restitution to look into the question of of post post World War II restitution specifically in Bosnia but also maybe throughout both Eastern and Western Europe I thought that might be something to do and I've started that there may be one or two people that stuck in my mind that I would like to to dig deeper into their biographies. And maybe something more on love and Evelyncia or some of the more interesting and unique facets of the Bosnian Jewish community, but having just finished publishing this book. I'm I'm at six since I was trying to decide what to do next but I've already started looking a little bit at restitution so anyway that that's where my trajectory may have amazing I wish you much luck and hot sluja with that endeavor.
Thank you so much. To our listeners I am your host Ari Barbalad on the new books network. I have been honored to be in dialogue today with Dr Francine Friedman. Francine is a merit to a professor of political science at Ball State University in Indiana.
We have been discussing her new book like salt for bread, the Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina published by Brill in 2022. Thank you. A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my card doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars.
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