Some History

July 7^th

We dedicate this day to visiting the many museums in the city, including the Jewish Museum, in the building of the old Sephardic Synagogue. Jews settled in Sarajevo after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and up until the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia, flourished in the city under both Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule. The Nazis, in collaboration with the Ustasha, the right-wing Croatian paramilitary, rounded up and exterminated much of the Jewish population. Those who survived, were eventually air-lifted to Israel by the Israeli government during the siege in the 90’s. Our second stop was at the National Museum, which was gravely damaged during the last war and is now partially reopened. The main exhibits there are archaeological, showing the continuous inhabitation of this land by cultures from pre-historical times. In this museum, in a specially constructed vault, lays the Sarajevo Hagaddah, the oldest illuminated Jewish manuscript in existence in the world. The story of how the Hagaddah made it from Spain to Sarajevo, and then how it survived both the German occupation and the tragic shelling of the National Library of Bosnia during the siege is in itself fascinating. This story is told in a wonderful article that appeared in The New Yorker in 2007  http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2007-12-03#folio=074.

Our last visit of the day was to the Historical Museum, formerly the Museum of the Revolution, which now houses the harrowing permanent exhibit “Sarajevo Under Siege”.

This unflinching show presents documentary material about the daily life in the surrounded city (3.5 years!!), where the residents had to brave sniper fire every  time they left their homes, where all the supply lines of food and medicine were cut by the Serbian army, where people had to improvise everything in order to keep a semblance of normal life, and where the frontline was directly behind people’s homes in the hills. It was a sobering experience to see all the photos and objects in the exhibition, including home-made guns and stoves. It was also a testament to the human spirit in a time of great hardship and  we were ashamed  to acknowledge  that we knew and cared so little about the plight of this city and its people at the time these events where happening, consumed by our own dramas thousands of miles away in California.

Titos’s trophies…We also ran into a very peculiar exhibition of communist-era trophies that were displayed as sculptural objects and imbued with a mysterious kind of magical aura. Communist kitsch to be sure, but something very new for us to see as artifacts of Tito’s time in power.