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April 16, 1999/30 Nisan 5759, Vol. 51, No. 29
Yugoslav Jews describe crisis via e-mail
RUTH E. GRUBER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
A former leader of the Yugoslav Jewish community plays tennis with a group of friends two times a week in Belgrade. When they play now, the men wear bull's-eye targets pinned to their backs - a symbol worn by Yugoslav citizens protesting NATO bombs.
Last week they had to cut short a game because of an air raid siren, but despite the bombing, the games "will probably go on," he quipped by e-mail, "as long as the tennis courts are intact - or as long as we are intact."
This man, like most people contacted for this story, asked that his name not be used. He added: "I still feel that this is surreal. I still cannot believe all this is happening. OK, I do, but not yet 100%. I suppose people in Beirut, Sarajevo and perhaps Vietnam, for that matter, felt the same way."
NATO's ongoing air war against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's campaign against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo has placed Yugoslavia's 3,000 Jews, most of whom live in Belgrade, in much the same crisis as that faced by their fellow countrymen. Yugoslavia's Jews are well integrated into mainstream society, and they share the same concerns, frustrations and fears - as well as the same black humor - experienced by their fellow citizens as they try to carry on their daily lives.
"Our worries are the same, and our troubles, too," said one Belgrade Jewish man, communicating, like most, by e-mail. "Food is still sufficient, so is water and electric power. Once that becomes scarce, we shall be in trouble."
Reported another man, a Jew from Sarajevo who, along with 200 others, found refuge in Belgrade seven years ago during the Bosnian war and remained in the Serbian capital: "Where I live in Belgrade, you can hear explosions and see lights from the rockets and bombs. In the suburbs, the situation is worse. The rockets fall even on civilians, and some of our friends spend all the time in the bunkers."
Said a community member who survived World War II and the bombing of Belgrade by the Nazis in 1941 and the Allies in 1943: "I hate shelters and do not have the feeling that my wife and I are endangered, so we do not go to shelters. We spend our time in the Jewish community offices, or at home."
The NATO attack triggered shock, surprise and anger, as well as dismay and disruption. It also triggered a sense of common fate against an outside enemy. "NATO united the Serbs for the first time since 1815," said one Jewish man.
The Yugoslav media - tightly controlled by the state - present the war as a struggle by tiny Serbia to maintain its sovereignty in the face of a Nazi-style onslaught by the greatest power on earth.
The Serbian atrocities in Kosovo are not mentioned, and the plight of the Kosovar refugees, if mentioned at all, is presented as the result of the NATO bombing campaign and attacks on Serb forces by the Kosovo Liberation Army.
Yugoslav Jews - who throughout the series of Balkan wars in the 1990s steered clear of taking any official political position - for the most part have closed ranks with the rest of the country in protesting the NATO campaign. This was expressed publicly in a March 28 appeal issued by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia to halt the attack.
"The bombing hurts all Yugoslav citizens including Jews, as we also are citizens of Yugoslavia," it said.
Individual Jews - such as the tennis player - protest symbolically by wearing a "target" or by dancing and singing at the anti-NATO open-air concerts held at noon daily in downtown Belgrade.
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