Chicago – January 28, 2024
Jews and Muslims from Bosnia and abroad gathered in Srebrenica on Saturday to jointly observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day and to promote compassion and dialogue amid the Israel-Hamas war.
The gathering was organized by the center preserving memory of Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since the Holocaust — the massacre in the closing months of Bosnia’s 1992-95 interethnic war of more than 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks in Srebrenica.
The event on Saturday underscored the message that the two communities share the experience of persecution and must stay united in their commitment to peace.
“Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Jews are one body, our ties are intricate, forged in hard times and times of prosperity and interaction,” said Husein Kavazović, the head of Bosnia’s Islamic Community, in his address to a group of survivors and descendants of victims of the Holocaust and the Srebrenica genocide who took part in the commemoration.
“Both our peoples have suffered and had experienced attempts to destroy and eradicate them (and) at the present moment, when the evils of antisemitism and Islamophobia are gaining ground around Europe and the world, we must renew our vow to be good neighbors and care for one another,” he added.
Menachem Rosensaft, a child of Holocaust survivors and until last summer the general counsel for the World Jewish Congress, was also in attendance. Rosensaft had repeatedly led delegations of Jewish scholars and young diplomats at ceremonies to commemorate the Srebrenica massacre that are held every July in the eastern Bosnian town.
“Today, we remember. Today, we mourn. We join together in sorrow, and our tears become prayers — prayers of remembrance, but also prayers of hope,” Rosensaft told the gathering.
“This commemoration is the place for us to jointly commit ourselves to doing everything in our power to prevent the horrors we remember here today from being repeated,” he added.
The commemoration was followed by the launch of the Srebrenica Muslim-Jewish Peace and Remembrance Initiative devised and signed by Rosensaft and Kavazović. The signing of the initiative was witnessed by a Srebrenica massacre survivor, Munira Subašić, and the leader of Bosnia’s Jewish community, Jakob Finci, who was born in a concentration camp in 1943.
