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Bosnian Jewry: A Small Community Meets a Unique Challenge During the 1990s War

September 16, 2007 | Ivan Ceresnjes

During wars, Jewish communities often become scapegoats and victims of the combatants. In the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s, the opposite happened. The Jewish community in the country’s capital Sarajevo extended humanitarian services indiscriminately to people of all religions and was respected by the three warring parties, Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, and Roman Catholic Croats. At present, six Jewish communities remain in Bosnia-Herzegovina with a total of a thousand members.

The Failure of UN Forces in Srebrenica

July 15, 2001 | Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld

In the UN safe area of Srebrenica, 6-8,000 Bosnian Moslems were murdered in July 1995 by the Bosnian Serbs, making it the largest civilian massacre in Europe since the Holocaust. The United Nations leaders, those of their peace-keeping forces, and the Dutch government had known for some time that the enclave was not defensible and had not taken adequate protective measures.