sarajevo | Nine years after the Dayton Agreement put an end to the brutal war in Bosnia, burnt-out buildings, plaques commemorating the dead and other scars from the devastating, nearly four-year siege still mar Sarajevo’s graceful urban landscape.
But there is ample evidence of reconstruction as the city and its people struggle to rebuild and recover. And Sarajevo is still the only major city in Europe where you can find a synagogue, a mosque and Catholic and Orthodox churches virtually on the same street.
This year at the High Holy Days, Sarajevo’s 700-member Jewish community marked a milestone in the reconstruction process. On Erev Rosh Hashanah, the 16th-century Old Synagogue, turned into a Jewish museum after World War II, was re-consecrated as a house of worship.
A mezuzah was nailed to the door of the austere stone building, from whose windows the slim minarets of neighboring mosques in Sarajevo’s Old Town are clearly visible.
Services were held and the traditional melodies of the Sephardic Jewish liturgy were sung there for the first time in more than 60 years.
“To be honest, all my life I’ve lived in Sarajevo, and this was the first occasion to have a service in the Sephardic synagogue,” said Jakob Finci, the head of the Bosnian Jewish Community.
“This was the first time to have it on the right place on the right way. That means really a lot. Let’s hope that it becomes a tradition and not only for the High Holy Days but also for some regular Shabbats.”
Eighty-five percent of Sarajevo’s Jews were killed in the Holocaust. In 1965, during ceremonies marking 400 years of Jewish presence in Bosnia, the Old Synagogue, though still owned by the remnant Jewish community, was converted into a city-run Jewish museum.
When the Bosnian War broke out in 1992, the Jewish Museum was closed and became a storage place for collections from other museums in the city. It remained closed until this summer, when it was reopened as a museum, under new management that includes Jewish-community as well as city representatives.
Finci said that given the scope and brutality of the ethnic conflict in Bosnia, the Holocaust section of the revamped museum will be particularly important.
“In Bosnia after Srebrenica, after this genocide, it’s not easy to understand — and some people are not willing to understand — that this has happened to other people also,” Finci said. The Holocaust took place “a long time ago, and it was even worse than Srebrenica, but naturally, Srebrenica is the peak of their world.”
There is no resident rabbi now in Sarajevo. But Eliezer Papo, who directs a center for Sephardi studies at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, came back home, as he does at least twice a year, to officiate at the High Holy Days.
It was, he said, an extraordinary moment, charged with emotion and significance.
“Instead of converting a living Jewish community into a museum, we are converting a museum into a living and functioning synagogue,” he said.