Shabbat Shalom

Eliezer Papo and I first met in the spring of 1988, through a series of God-ordained circumstances, which began a lasting friendship. He was the young rabbi of the 500-year-old Jewish community in Sarajevo, and I was a young and hopeful church planter from America living in the heart of communist Yugoslavia. During his first visit to our home, our three-year old son Johan came in from playing outside. Johan stopped in the doorway of the living room and stared at the stranger. When Eliezer greeted him, Johan rattled off a long sentence to him in Bosnian, and ran off again. I beamed with pride that my three year old had such a confident command of the Bosnian language, which I myself was struggling to learn through language classes at the university. Eliezer said to me, “O, your son speaks so well the Bosnian language. He just cussed me out with the perfect accent.” I would later get payback when visiting his home for the first time, and his pet monkey peed on my leg.

Eliezer’s father became a member of our church, Biblijska Vjerska Zajednica RAFAEL, in the autumn of 1990. Sadly, his father died during the war a couple years later.

The Sephardic Jewish community has been an intricate part of the history of Sarajevo for over 500 years, having fled from the Inquisition of Spain and Portugal (1492 – 1497 AD) into the Ottoman province of Bosnia. In fact, Bosnia was the only region or country at the time within Europe that welcomed the Jewish refugees. The Ashkenazic Jews of Hungary entered Bosnia in 1687 AD after the Austro-Hungarian empire ran the Turkish armies out of Hungary. During World War II, around 10,000 Jews were murdered in Sarajevo. The several thousand Jews of Sarajevo that remained alive after WWII were divided in their decision for the future: half left to live in other nations, and the other half stayed on to live in Sarajevo. Those that stayed, for the most part, became atheist and joined the communist party.

During the Bosnian Civil War (1992-1995), the Jewish community in Sarajevo, through their social program La Benevolencija played a significant and unique role in supplying medicine for the besieged city and helped around 3,000 people to escape the death and devastation during those years. The Bosnian postal service this year is honoring their heroic work through issuing a series of stamps.