This lecture places focus on Muslim-Christian-Jewish Relations during the Holocaust in Bosnia-Herzegovina, presented by Professor Elijas Tauber
The story of the Holocaust in Bosnia-Herzegovina is little known in the West. It’s a complicated situation with continuing repercussions on post-war history. As Bosnia became part of the “Independent State of Croatia” following the fall of Yugoslavia in 1941, the region’s Jews struggled to survive in the midst of the Holocaust, a simultaneous three-sided ethnic conflict between Bosnian Croats (Catholics), Serbs (Orthodox), and Muslims, and a civil war pitting Serbian royalist Chetniks against Communist-led pro-republican Partisans. Despite the convergence of these various conflicts, many of the area’s Jews survived, mostly with the assistance of Muslim and Christian neighbors. No one is better able to tell this story than Prof. Elijas (Eli) Tauber, journalist, historian, and member of Sarajevo’s Jewish community, whose mother was a Holocaust survivor and who is himself a survivor of the 1990s war. Tauber (Ph.D. in History from The University of Sarajevo) is the author of several books on the history of the Bosnian Jews, Sephardic Jewish language/culture, and the Holocaust. His particular areas of interest are Bosnian Holocaust rescuers (Muslim and Christian “Righteous among the Nations”) and Jewish-Muslim cooperation in Bosnia.
