The Jewish community in Belgrade needs the moral as well as material support of Jews worldwide as it struggles to carry on an active Jewish life against the background of war in the former Yugoslavia, according to a representative of the community.
Tamara Stainer-Popovic, director of cultural and educational activities at the Belgrade Jewish Community, made her appeal at a weekend seminar of the World Confederation of Jewish Communities, held in Rome.
“There has to be communication with world Jewry,” she later told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in an interview. “We never needed them like we do now.”
She said the Belgrade community, the largest in the former Yugoslavia, with about 2,000 members ranging from young children to elderly Holocaust survivors, is “living two realities.”
“We are reopening a Jewish kindergarten, we have teen-agers eager to learn about Judaism and we are planning to begin a Jewish Sunday school program,” she said.
In addition, she said, a Belgrade man, Izak Eigenbach, is being trained in Israel to be a rabbi and is expected to take up his position in about one year.
Belgrade’s current rabbi, Cadik Danon, is elderly.
“But all this is happening against the background of the war and the sanctions; life in the community is going on, parallel with the sanctions,” she said.
The sanctions imposed by the United Nations have stopped not only import of food and fuel but also have impeded humanitarian aid, such as medicine, which is not supposed to be affected by the sanctions.
Mental patients are seen wandering the streets unmedicated.
Though so far there has been no shooting in Belgrade, people have been suffering greatly from disastrous material living conditions, uncontrolled inflation and devaluation of the currency, which has created extreme psychological pressure.
‘BELGRADE IS SHEER HELL’
“Belgrade is sheer hell,” said Stainer-Popovic, a psychologist whose husband, Brane Popovic, became president of the Belgrade Jewish community 18 months ago. She said effects of the U.N.-decreed sanctions against what is left of Yugoslavia — Serbia and Montenegro — had hit Belgrade’s mainly middle-class-Jews hard, as they had affected most of the population.
“The estimated inflation rate for November was 20,000 percent,” she said. This has been paralleled by a free-fall devaluation of the dinar against Western currencies.
“There are jokes,” she said, “such as, if you are going out to lunch at a restaurant, change your money after you eat, not before –because it will be considerably cheaper.”
Average salaries, she said, ranged from 20 to 50 marks ($12 to $30) a month, but a kilogram of meat cost 15 marks. Medicine is virtually unobtainable, she said, and getting adequate food is also a problem.
Stainer-Popovic said the Belgrade Jewish community, which like other Jewish communities in the former Yugoslavia receives support from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, was doing what it could to help the Jews whose lives have been disrupted by the bloody conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
“World Jewry, when it thinks of Bosnian Jews, thinks of Sarajevo,” she said. “But there are other small Jewish communities in Bosnia — some of them are in Serbian-held territory and can only be reached through Belgrade.
“Some of them are worse off than Sarajevo. With the Joint, we try to help,” she said.
About 1,000 Jewish refugees from Sarajevo and elsewhere in Bosnia fled to Belgrade. Most stayed with friends or family for about six months before moving on to Israel and elsewhere, but about 200 have remained.
“Against the background of the Yugoslav horror,” she said, there is “an apparent increase of anti-Semitism,” although,she said she herself had not been targeted.
Before the outbreak of the war that destroyed Yugoslavia, and also after fighting erupted, Serbian officials had tried to win Jewish support from outside Yugoslavia, through such pro-government groups as the Serbian-Jewish Friendship Society.
Many Jews in Belgrade at the time expressed deep concern over attempts to manipulate the Jewish community and divide Jews in various parts of the country.
Stainer-Popovic said the leadership of the Belgrade community, mainly former youth leaders now in their 40s, had tried “to take a stand that in an ethnic war we won’t do anything that will injure any Jews.”
She said that while there had been no direct pressure on the community from the government, Jewish attitudes and activities were suddenly given much greater prominence in the mainly state-controlled media.
“For a while you got the impression that there were 2 million Jews in Belgrade, rather than 2,000.
“For example, Serbs are leaving all the time, but if 70 Jews left, it was highlighted as ‘The Jews are Leaving.’ What Jews were thinking became very relevant,” she said.
This has eased somewhat, she said, but still, she added, there were at least two recent major television programs with an anti-Semitic slant.
One of them asked, “Were we wrong to trust the Jews as our friends?”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
