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As nationalism rises in Serbia, a Holocaust education seminar for teachers gets more popular
ŠABAC, Serbia (JTA) — On a recent morning in the Serbian town of Šabac, 69-year-old Borka Marinković sat around a table with half a dozen schoolteachers, none of them Jewish, and opened up about her complicated life as the daughter of Holocaust survivors.
Marinković’s mother was interned at a concentration camp on the Croatian island of Rab, but in 1943, partisans rescued her and she joined the resistance effort as a cryptographer. She then met Marinković’s father, a Yugoslavian partisan.
Three years later, after the war ended, they married and began a family, but they rarely spoke of the horrors they had endured. Only at the age of 15 did Marinković, née Salcberger — whose first name means “fighter” — even learn she was a Jew.
“In 1983, I married a Serb and gladly took his family name. Somehow it helped me assimilate into the new society,” said Marinković. “But the ethnic wars of the 1990s gave me flashbacks of the Holocaust, and at some point in my life I felt ashamed that I had kept my Jewish identity secret.”
Marinković, who told her story calmly but brought her entire audience to tears, eventually wrote a book about the tortured experiences of second-generation Holocaust survivors like herself.
“This is my first time speaking with teachers,” Marinković told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency through a translator after her story, which was followed by a breakaway session in which educators discussed how to use the narrative in a classroom setting. “I get emotional when I talk about my parents, but I think this message is very important for future generations.”
Marinković and two other second-generation survivors were participating in a seminar with 30 Serbian teachers at the Hotel Sloboda in Šabac (pronounced SHA-betz), a town on the banks of the Sava River whose small Jewish community was decimated during the war. The hotel is only two city blocks from a branch of the national bank where in August 1941 the Nazis hanged 10 prominent Šabac Jews from electricity poles.
The event was arranged by The Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights (TOLI) — a New York-based nonprofit that provides Holocaust education programs to teachers in the United States and Europe — in conjunction with local partner Terraforming, a Serbian civil society organization that teaches about the Holocaust and fights antisemitism and xenophobia.
Svetlana Maksimovic, 43, an English teacher at the seminar from the southern Serbian town of Prokulje, said “Serbs aren’t familiar with the Holocaust.”
“Even well-educated Serbs don’t know much about it,” said Maksimovic, a Serbian Orthodox woman who visited Israel last summer. “I think it’s a really big step for Serbia’s educational system that this topic is now being taught in schools.”
Serbian teachers attending the TOLI seminar on Holocaust education, along with three daughters of Holocaust survivors, gather in front of the recently restored synagogue in Šabac, Serbia. (Larry Luxner)
Oana Bajka, the associate director of TOLI International Programs, said the Aug. 21-24 event marked the 54th such seminar for TOLI and the third of its type in Serbia; the previous two, in 2021 and 2022, took place in Novi Sad, about an hour’s bus ride north of Šabac. TOLI now operates in 11 countries throughout Europe: Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Spain and Ukraine.
“In every country, the teachers gain an understanding about the responsibilities of their governments during the Holocaust,” said Bajka, who joined TOLI in 2019 and works from an office in Timasoara, Romania. “That’s one of our big challenges, because often governments have difficulty acknowledging their collaboration with Nazi Germany.”
Frequently, said Bajka, people tend to identify with their nation’s good deeds while overlooking the crimes. For example, she said, “in Bulgaria they talk a lot about saving Bulgarian Jews, and not so much Bulgaria’s role in deporting the Jews from Thrace and Macedonia.”
Under President Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia — like Poland, Hungary and most recently Slovakia — has veered politically to the far right in recent years. Local fascist and neo-Nazi groups are motivated by traditional antisemitism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Anger over the 2008 declaration of independence by predominantly Albanian-speaking Kosovo — which most Serbs consider an integral part of their country — has also fueled the rise of intense nationalism in this country of 7.1 million, which includes about 3,000 Jews.
Katarzyna Suszkiewicz, head of the education department at the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, Poland, makes a point during an August 2023 TOLI Holocaust education seminar in Šabac, Serbia. (Larry Luxner)
Antisemitism and Holocaust discourse are issues elsewhere in the Balkans and in parts of Eastern Europe, too. Last year, Romania’s nationalist AUR party issued a statement calling Holocaust education — which had just been mandated in Romanian high schools — a “minor topic.” His comments were condemned by David Saranga, Israel’s then-ambassador to Romania. But on Aug. 28, Saranga’s successor, Reuven Azar, met with AUR’s president, George Simion, after the latter agreed that Romania is indeed responsible for the killing of Jews on territory it held during World War II.
Šabac resident Natalija Perišić decided to take action on the subject after reading the book “Sophie’s Choice.” Author William Styron based Sophie on Hungarian Holocaust survivor Olga Lengyel, whose 1946 book, “Five Chimneys: A Woman Survivor’s True Story of Auschwitz,” was one of the first published accounts about the Nazi genocide.
Perišić says the murder of six million Jews has particular relevance in Serbia, which helped perpetrate the July 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys in the town of Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian War. In 2013, then-Serbian President Tomislav Nikolić apologized for the “crime” of Srebrenica but refused to call it a genocide.
“We think of ourselves as a nation of people against fascism, and we like to think of Serbian bravery,” said Perišić. “But I do not see that we’ve drawn any lessons from the 1990s.”
Belgrade educator Alexander Todosijevic, president of the Serbia History Teachers’ Association, said that this program was especially timely, given the pressure teachers now face about how they present history.
“It’s very important for Serbian teachers to know about the Holocaust and to be motivated to teach it,” he said, adding that the seminar, which provided pedagogical approaches, has become popular in Serbia. More than 150 teachers applied to take part this year alone.
RELATED: A Serbian city’s Jewish community barely survived the Holocaust. Now it might die out.
TOLI also takes its seminar participants to sites “connected to Jewish heritage and local history,” Bajka said. On the program this year was a scholarly presentation about the ill-fated Kladovo transport — a secret effort to help 1,051 Jewish refugees escape Nazi-occupied Europe via the Danube River and Black Sea to then-Palestine. The effort ended in failure when their chartered ship got stranded in Šabac, and the Nazis killed nearly everyone aboard or in the Sajmište concentration camp near Belgrade.
Teachers visited the burned-out remains of a mill that had temporarily housed about 500 refugees from the Kladovo transport, as well as a small synagogue where the Jews of Šabac used to pray.
Katarzyna Suszkiewicz, who heads the education department at Krakow’s Galicia Jewish Museum in Poland, said these teachers are “on the front lines.”
“They have direct contact with youth, and we must support them,” she said. “Local leaders or NGOs don’t have that kind of contact. And if teachers are incompetent or don’t know much, they’ll never risk interacting with students on such a difficult subject.”
Suzkiewicz, 38, isn’t Jewish, but she can relate to the Holocaust because her grandmother was a forced laborer in Germany. In Poland, where 90% of the country’s 3 million Jews were murdered in Nazi death camps, “historical facts put us in a spotlight, and this is something we will never escape,” she said.
“You cannot separate Jewish stories from Polish stories. At some point, I felt robbed because I wasn’t taught much about Jews at school, and so I wasn’t properly prepared for my visit to Auschwitz,” she said. “For many, the Holocaust is very distant. But atrocities are not that far away, and when the war in Ukraine broke out, they realized that Auschwitz can happen again.”
A memorial in the courtyard of the synagogue in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city, lists the names of Jewish partisans killed while fighting the Nazis during World War II. (Larry Luxner)
TOLI’s local partner in Serbia, Terraforming, was founded in 2008 by Miško Stanišić. A non-Jew born and raised in Sarajevo, Stanišić fled in 1992 during intense fighting between ethnic Serbs and Bosnians, taking refuge in the Netherlands and later Sweden. He now lives in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second-largest city that was home to a once-sizable Jewish community.
“I believe that the majority population should be in charge of protecting the minority, and giving voice to those who are weak,” he said.
Terraforming has also produced a series of educational graphic novels about the Holocaust based on biographies, said Stanišić.
“They’re not just stories, but combined teaching materials that include primary sources, maps and historical photos. It’s all digital,” he said. “We’re targeting youth from 10 years old up to young adults. There are obviously not enough visual resources to tell these stories.”
Nor are there many eyewitnesses to the Holocaust left in Serbia. In fact, said Stanišić, “just a handful, maybe 10 survivors all in their late 90s. That is why we invite the second generation.”
Maksimovic, the English teacher from Prokulje, became fascinated with the Holocaust after reading “The Letters of Hilda Dajč.” The graphic novel by Aleksandr Zograf is based on the recollections of an Austrian-born Jewish nurse who volunteered to work at Croatia’s Nazi-run Sajmište concentration camp and was later gassed there — along with 6,000 other women, children and elderly men — in the spring of 1942.
“Her letters really moved me. I compare her to Anne Frank,” Maksimovic said. “We’ve also had wars here and we know what genocide means. It’s very important to introduce this topic from an early age, so that it never happens again. And there’s a way to teach this to children, without the horror, in a way they’ll understand.”
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Down and Out in Paris and London
The Oxford Circus station in London’s Underground metro. Photo: Pixabay
JNS.org – In my previous column, I wrote about the rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl in Paris at the hands of three boys just one year older than her, who showered her with antisemitic abuse as they carried out an act of violation reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in southern Israel. This week, my peg is another act of violence—one less horrifying and less traumatic, but which similarly suggests that the writing may be on the wall for the Jews in much of Europe.
Last week, a group of young Jewish boys who attend London’s well-regarded Hasmonean School was assaulted by a gang of antisemitic thugs. The attack occurred at Belsize Park tube station on the London Underground, in a neighborhood with a similar demographic and sensibility to New York’s Upper West Side, insofar as it is home to a large, long-established Jewish population with shops, cafes and synagogues serving that community. According to the mother of one of the Jewish boys, an 11-year-old, the gang “ran ahead of my son and kicked one of his friends to the ground. They were trying to push another kid onto the tracks. They got him as far the yellow line.” When the woman’s son bravely tried to intervene to protect his friends, he was chased down and elbowed in the face, dislodging a tooth. “Get out of the city, Jew!” the gang told him.
Since the attack, her son has had trouble sleeping. “My son is very shaken. He couldn’t sleep last night. He said ‘It’s not fair. Why do they do this to us?’” she disclosed. “We love this country,” she added, “and we participate and we contribute, but now we’re being singled out in exactly the same way as Jews were singled out in 1936 in Berlin. And for the first time in my life. I am terrified of using the tube. What’s going on?”
The woman and her family may not be in London long enough to find out. According to The Jewish Chronicle, they are thinking of “fleeing” Britain—not a verb we’d hoped to encounter again in a Jewish context after the mass murder we experienced during the previous century. But here we are.
When I was a schoolboy in London, I had a history teacher who always told us that no two situations are exactly alike. “Comparisons are odious, boys,” he would repeatedly tell the class. That was an insight I took to heart, and I still believe it to be true. There are structural reasons that explain why the 2020s are different from the 1930s in significant ways. For one thing, European societies are more affluent and better equipped to deal with social conflicts and economic strife than they were a century ago. Laws, too, are more explicit in the protections they offer to minorities, and more punishing of hate crimes and hate speech. Perhaps most importantly, there is a Jewish state barely 80 years old which all Jews can make their home if they so desire.
Therein lies the rub, however. Since 1948, Israel has allowed Jews inside and outside the Jewish state to hold their heads high and to feel as though they are a partner in the system of international relations, rather than a vulnerable, subjugated group at the mercy of the states where we lived as an often hated minority. Israel’s existence is the jewel in the crown of Jewish emancipation, sealing what we believed to be our new status, in which we are treated as equals, and where the antisemitism that plagued our grandparents and great-grandparents has become taboo.
If Israel represents the greatest achievement of the Jewish people in at least 100 years, small wonder that it has become the main target of today’s reconstituted antisemites. And if one thing has been clear since the atrocities by Hamas on Oct. 7, it’s that Israel’s existence is not something that Jews—with the exception of that small minority of anti-Zionists who do the bidding of the antisemites and who echo their ignorance and bigotry—are willing to compromise on. What’s changed is that it is increasingly difficult for Jews to remain in the countries where they live and express their Zionist sympathies at the same time. We are being attacked because of these sympathies on social media, at demonstrations and increasingly in the streets by people with no moral compass, who regard our children as legitimate targets. Hence, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that while the 2020s may not be the 1930s, they certainly feel like the 1930s.
And so the age-old question returns: Should Jews, especially those in Europe, where they confront the pincer movement of burgeoning Muslim populations and a resurgent far-left in thrall to the Palestinian cause, stay where they are, or should they up sticks and move to Israel? Should we be thinking, given the surge in antisemitism of the past few months, of giving up on America as well? I used to have a clear view of all this. Aliyah is the noblest of Zionist goals and should be encouraged, but I always resisted the notion that every Jew should live in Israel—firstly, because a strong Israel needs vocal, confident Diaspora communities that can advocate for it in the corridors of power; and secondly, because moving to Israel should ideally be a positive act motivated by love, not a negative act propelled by fear.
My view these days isn’t as clear as it was. I still believe that a strong Israel needs a strong Diaspora, and I think it’s far too early to give up on the United States—a country where Jews have flourished as they never did elsewhere in the Diaspora. Yet the situation in Europe increasingly reminds me of the observation of the Russian Zionist Leo Pinsker in “Autoemancipation,” a doom-laden essay he wrote in 1882, during another dark period of Jewish history: “We should not persuade ourselves that humanity and enlightenment will ever be radical remedies for the malady of our people.” The antisemitism we are dealing with now presents itself as “enlightened,” based on boundless sympathy for an Arab nation allegedly dispossessed by Jewish colonists. When our children are victimized by it, this antisemitism ceases to be a merely intellectual challenge, and becomes a matter of life and death. As Jews and as human beings, we are obliged to choose life—which, in the final analysis, when nuance disappears and terror stalks us, means Israel.
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Hamas Says No Major Changes to Ceasefire Proposal After ‘Vague Wording’ Amendments by US
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a campaign rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, U.S., June 28, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz/File Photo
i24 News – A senior official from the terrorist organization Hamas called the changes made by the US to the ceasefire proposal “vague” on Saturday night, speaking to the Arab World Press.
The official said that the US promises to end the war are without a clear Israeli commitment to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and agree to a permanent ceasefire.
US President Joe Biden made “vague wording” changes to the proposal on the table, although it amounted to an insufficient change in stance, he said.
“The slight amendments revolve around the very nature of the Israeli constellation, and offer nothing new to bridge the chasm between what is proposed and what is acceptable to us,” he said.
“We will not deviate from our three national conditions, the most important of which is the end of the war and the complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip,” he added.
Another Hamas official said that the amendments were minor and applied to only two clauses.
US President Joe Biden made the amendments to bridge gaps amid an impasse between Israel and Hamas over a hostage deal mediated by Qatar and Egypt.
Hamas’s demands for a permanent ceasefire have been met with Israeli leaders vowing that the war would not end until the 120 hostages still held in Gaza are released and the replacement of Hamas in control of the Palestinian enclave.
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Sacred Spies?
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
JNS.org – How far away is theory from practice? “In theory,” a new system should work. But it doesn’t always, does it? How many job applicants ticked all the boxes “theoretically,” but when it came to the bottom line they didn’t get the job done?
And how many famous people were better theorists than practitioners?
The great Greek philosopher Aristotle taught not only philosophy but virtue and ethics. The story is told that he was once discovered in a rather compromised moral position by his students. When they asked him how he, the great Aristotle, could engage in such an immoral practice, he had a clever answer: “Now I am not Aristotle.”
A similar tale is told of one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, Bertrand Russell. He, too, expounded on ethics and morality. And like Aristotle, he was also discovered in a similarly morally embarrassing situation.
When challenged, his rather brilliant answer was: “So what if I teach ethics? People teach mathematics, and they’re not triangles!”
This idea is relevant to this week’s Torah portion, Shelach, which contains the famous story of Moses sending a dozen spies on a reconnaissance mission to the Land of Israel. The mission goes sour. It was meant to be an intelligence-gathering exercise to see the best way of conquering Canaan. But it resulted in 10 of the 12 spies returning with an utterly negative report of a land teeming with giants and frightening warriors who, they claimed, would eat us alive. “We cannot ascend,” was their hopeless conclusion.
The people wept and had second thoughts about the Promised Land, and God said, indeed, you will not enter the land. In fact, for every day of the spies’ disastrous journey, the Israelites would languish a year in the wilderness. Hence, the 40-year delay in entering Israel. The day of their weeping was Tisha B’Av, which became a day of “weeping for generations” when both our Holy Temples were destroyed on that same day and many other calamities befell our people throughout history.
And the question resounds: How was it possible that these spies, all righteous noblemen, handpicked personally by Moses for the job, should so lose the plot? How did they go so wrong, so off-course from the Divine vision?
Naturally, there are many commentaries with a variety of explanations. To me personally, the most satisfying one I’ve found comes from a more mystical source.
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, in his work Likkutei Torah, explains it thus: The error of the spies was less blatant than it seems. Their rationale was, in fact, a “holy” one. They actually meant well. The Israelites had been beneficiaries of the mighty miracles of God during their sojourn in the wilderness thus far. God had been providing for them supernaturally with manna from heaven every day, water that flowed from the “Well of Miriam,” Clouds of Glory that smoothed the roads and even dry cleaned their clothes. In the wilderness, the people were enjoying a taste of heaven itself. All their material needs were taken care of miraculously. With no material distractions, they were able to live a life of spiritual bliss, of refined existence and could devote themselves fully to Torah, prayer and spiritual experiences.
But the spies knew that as soon as the Israelites entered the Promised Land, the manna would cease to fall and they would have to till the land, plow, plant, knead, bake and make a living by the sweat of their brow. No more bread from heaven, but bread from the earth. Furthermore, they would have to battle the Canaanite nations for the land. What chance would they then have to devote themselves to idyllic, spiritual pursuits?
So, the spies preferred to remain in the wilderness rather than enter the land. Why be compelled to resort to natural and material means of surviving and living a wholly physical way of life when they could enjoy spiritual ecstasy and paradise undisturbed? Why get involved in the “rat race”?
But, of course, as “holy” and spiritual as their motivation may have been, the spies were dead wrong.
The journey in the wilderness was meant to be but a stepping stone to the ultimate purpose of the Exodus from Egypt: entering the Promised Land and making it a Holy Land. God has plenty of angels in heaven who exist in a pure, spiritual state. The whole purpose of creation was to have mortal human beings, with all their faults and frailties, to make the physical world a more spiritual place. To bring heaven down to earth.
While their argument was rooted in piety, for the spies to opt out of the very purpose of creation was to miss the whole point. What are we here for? To sit in the lotus position and meditate, or to get out there and change the world? Yes, the spies were “holy,” but theirs was an escapist holiness.
The Torah is not only a book of wisdom; it is also a book of action. Torah means instruction. It teaches us how to live our lives, meaningfully and productively in the pursuit of God’s intended desire to make our world a better, more Godly place. This we do not only by study and prayer, the “theoretical” part of Torah but by acts of goodness and kindness, by mitzvot performed physically in the reality of the material world. Theory alone leaves us looking like Aristotle with his pants down.
Yes, it is a cliché but a well-worn truth: Torah is a “way of life.”
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