January 13, 2003

A GERMAN book conservationist, Andrea Pataki, restores the world-famous Sarajevo Haggadah, a traditional book of prayers, poems and stories about the Jewish exodus from Egypt. (Eric Kanalstein/United Nations Photo)

Ancient Haggadah symbol of peace in battered Bosnia
___By Viola Gienger
___Religion News Service
___SARAJEVO, Bosnia (RNS)--The rich blues, tans and reds of the medieval illuminations gleam under the glass pyramid that keeps the ancient Jewish manuscript safe. But the quiet elegance of the room where the world-famous Sarajevo Haggadah has come to rest belies the book's 600 years of danger and rescue and the continuing tension in the street outside--the one known not so long ago as Sniper Alley.
___A recent ceremony at the city's National Museum marked the first time the mysterious Haggadah has gone on public display. It is the centerpiece in a secured, climate-controlled room that it shares with ancient documents from Bosnia's predominant religions--Orthodoxy, Islam and Catholicism.
___The individuals, embassies and organizations that contributed to the $120,000 U.N.-sponsored project hope it will go some way toward quieting the naysayers about the potential for ethnic and religious tolerance in Bosnia.
___"This is one of the proofs in this country not only that we can live together but that we used to live together in this country for centuries and let's hope we can live together in the centuries ahead of us," said Jakob Finci, president of the Jewish Community of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo.
___It is a high hope. Seven years after the end of the nearly four-year war, certainty eludes Bosnia. More than 230,000 people were killed, millions were displaced and buildings from the largest hospitals to the smallest village homes were ravaged. Despite widespread reconstruction, a chronically weak economy heightens social tension.
___Discontent and infighting collapsed a short-lived moderate political alliance and allowed nationalist parties to return to power two months ago. An international overseer tries to fill in the governing gaps.
___"This country is so divided in so many ways that probably only the opening of this room brought them all together with one idea," said Finci, who shared the podium with the heads of Bosnia's Orthodox Church and its Islamic community. One of the main speakers was the chairman of the country's three-member presidency, whose hard-line Bosnian Serb political party was founded by an indicted war criminal.
___Perhaps not surprisingly, then, even the plans to display the Sarajevo Haggadah took years, a little diplomacy and more than a tad of arm-twisting. First there was the lawsuit that had to be settled between the museum and the government over a brief but risky display of the Haggadah during a wartime Passover celebration. And there were the sensitive decisions about what relics from other religions to display alongside the Haggadah.
___"This wasn't a wave of religious reconciliation and ecumenism, believe me," said Jacques Paul Klein, the United Nations' special representative to Bosnia who spearheaded the project. At one point, he wrote a personal check to speed along the bureaucratic process.
___Believed to have been created in 14th century Spain as a wedding present for a young Jewish couple, the book's 107 pages contain the standard elements of a Haggadah--prayers, poems and stories about the Jews' exodus from Egypt that traditionally guide Passover seders.
___This particular Haggadah has some extras. One of the 34 pages of illuminations shows the world as round, remarkable considering people were still being burned at the stake 200 years later for suggesting such a thing. It also depicts the human form, a practice thought to have been unacceptable in Judaism at the time. And it goes beyond the exodus from Egypt in its scope, starting instead with the Creation and on through to the death of Moses.
___In some way, the book's own journey through history reflects the tales of rescue that are told within its pages, said Yechiel Bar-Chaim, a program director for the American Joint Distribution Committee, the main overseas philanthropic arm of the American Jewish community.
___The Sarajevo Haggadah escaped the Inquisition along with its owners when all Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. The family fled to Italy, where the Haggadah impressed a censor enough in 1609 for him to spare its parchment pages from the Catholic Church's book burnings.
___How it crossed the Adriatic Sea and arrived in Sarajevo remains a mystery. In 1894, a man named Joseph Cohen sold it to the National Museum for about $7,000 in today's currency, a price the synagogue couldn't afford.
___Tucked out of public view, the manuscript required another rescue during World War II, when 80 percent of Sarajevo's 12,000 Jews were killed. Legend has it that when the Nazis came looking for the Haggadah, the Catholic director of the National Museum fended them off with a bit of trickery and the Muslim librarian swept the Haggadah to safety in a mountain village nearby.
___Again in early summer 10 years ago, shells exploded all around the National Museum on the front line, and soldiers fought in the botanical garden as the Haggadah huddled in a safe in the darkened basement. A room nearby was flooded because shelling had burst the museum's heating system.
___A Muslim archaeology professor, Enver Imamovic, recruited police to help him rescue the most precious artifacts from the museum. They broke open the Haggadah's safe with a hammer and a pickax and took the manuscript to safety. The location remained a secret throughout the war.
___Imamovic often is asked by foreigners why he rescued the book since he is Muslim, a question he finds absurd. "I did it out of professional ethics," he explains.
___"Each and every time it was saved, it was a small miracle," Finci said. "So this legend--how the Haggadah was saved--became part of the Bosnian legend of how we were saved as a people, as a country, despite everything."
___

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