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The author provides an overview of Jewish history in the former Yugoslavia, with an emphasis on the lives and activities of women. Until the Holocaust, the diverse Jewish community prospered and Jewish women's organizations multiplied and grew. Jewish women were active in organizing and providing aid, in supplies and medical work, in every Balkan war. After the decimation of the Holocaust, only a fraction of the community remained. Yugoslavia enjoyed relative freedom of movement and freedom of religion under communism, however, and eventually some women's organizations were rebuilt and were able to continue their benevolent work throughout the modern conflicts, even at the high point of violence in Sarajevo. Each of the new countries continues to have its own women's organizations, even in smaller communities like Split, where the Jewish population is only 120.

Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?

Author(s): Markowitz, Fran

Date: 2012

Topics: Nationalism, Ethnicity, Conflict and Controversy, Main Topic: Identity and Community

Abstract: Bosnia-Herzegovina’s governance depends on a constitution that was drafted in Dayton, Ohio. It designates the Bosniacs, Croats and Serbs (along with Others) the country’s constituent peoples. Although Jews have been residents of Bosnia-Herzegovina for 500 years, with the country’s new constitution they have disappeared from official records into the residual category of Others. This article considers how, nonetheless, the Jews of Sarajevo persist as an active community and a named group even as its identity is being defined by others. The interrelated questions, “Whose Jews? Whose Bosnia? Whose Europe?” have no neat, finite answers while Jews-as-Others and Bosnia as an ethnically divided and overdetermined, EU-supervised country remain precariously perched on unsettled and unsettling configurations of rights and power.

Antisemitism and Jewish Identity in Serbia After the 1991 Collapse of the Yugoslav State

Author(s): Sekelj, Laslo

Date: 1997

Topics: Main Topic: Antisemitism, Antisemitism, Conflict and Controversy

Abstract: The paper first describes the Jewish community in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which consists of the two federal units of Serbia and Montenegro. There is no Jewish community in Montenegro; only a few Jews have ever lived there. In Serbia there are only 3,500 Jews in nine local communities affiliated with the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia. Jewish identity is a voluntary ethnic self-identification; some members of these communities are not of Jewish origin, but have integrated into the community through their marriage ties.

The paper then focuses on the heritage of antisemitism in Serbia. After 1945, i.e., from the time Communists came into power until the final disintegration of the Yugoslav state, one may distinguish three stages: 1945–1967, a period characterized by no public display of antisemitism; 1967–1988, in which antisemitism disguised as anti-Zionism; and 1988–1991, which saw the process of "republicanization" and functionalization of Jews. The paper describes the re-emergence of traditional antisemitism in Serbia since 1991, and the misuse of Jews for the Serbian nationalistic agenda as part of the post-communist development in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

It can be concluded that antisemitism in post-communist Yugoslavia, although peripheral, is a constant phenomenon.

Antisemitism in Eurasia - 2013

Author(s): Charny, Semen; Likhachev, Vyacheslav