Throughout the Yugoslav wars Belgrade and Zagreb ran public relations campaigns to manipulate Jewish public opinion, both domestic and international. This curious and little-known episode of the Milosevic era began soon after Milosevic’s 1987 visit to Kosovo, when Klara Mandic founded the Serbian-Jewish Friendship Society (SJFS). A Belgrade dentist who lost seventy-three members of her family in the Holocaust, Mandic was a charismatic figure, with long red fingernails, who wore two large gold stars of David around her neck. She was well connected among the Serbian intellectuals who were then increasingly comparing the Serbs to the Jews, as two martyred peoples with ‘heavenly’ missions.
Many prominent Serb thinkers joined the SJFS, including the writer Dobrica Cosic. In an interview in March 1993, Mandic recalled the society’s genesis: ‘I went straight to Slobodan Milosevic to ask for his support. He agreed, and he stood completely behind me.’1 Mandic was friends with both the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, and Goran Hadzic, president of the rebel Serb republic in Krajina. Karadzic joined the society and there were rumours that the two were lovers. ‘I am an adviser to both presidents, and I am very proud of that,’ she boasted. Mandic used her connections to Milosevic to organise ‘Serbian Week’ in Israel, in May 1990. Serbian Week promoted business and tourism and town-twinning. Belgrade was twinned with Tel Aviv and Novi Sad with Haifa.
Two years later, Mandic went on a speaking tour across the United States, to warn American Jews about Tudjman’s new state. Mandic later explained: ‘The key issue is that the Orthodox Church did not teach people how to hate, as the Catholic Church did. Jews and Serbs have a common history of genocide. But the difference is that the world knows about Jewish suffering, but we could not speak about Serb suffering. We aim to get the truth out about the Serbs.’ This then, was the society’s real agenda: to use the claim of a ‘common history’ to attack Croatia. She continued: ‘There is a new fascism spreading through Europe, through Croatia which is an exponent of German and Austrian policies. At the head of this is Tudjman. They wear the same uniforms, use the same symbols and sing the same songs as the Ustasha. Serbs are the first victims of the new fascism. Six million pairs of eyes ask me from the sky, “do you see what is happening – will you try and do something?”’
Mandic claimed: ‘Serbia is a country where there has never been anti-Semitism. Not among the laws, nor among the people. The society was founded to further the friendship between Serbs and Jews, that goes back centuries and centuries.’ Thus the myth. The historical reality was different. During the nineteenth century several restrictive decrees were passed against the Jewish community and Jews did not enjoy full citizenship until the end of the century. When the Germans invaded in 1941 about seventy thousand Jews were living in Yugoslavia. There were families in Sarajevo who still spoke Ladino, the medieval Judeo-Spanish of their ancestors, expelled from Spain in 1492.
The Serbian puppet regime of General Milan Nedic worked with the Nazis to exterminate most of Serbia’s Jews. Concentration camps were set up within Serbia. Jews were gassed in vans – precursors of the gas chamber – that trundled back and forth across the Danube bridges. Others fought as partisans. One, Mose Pijade, had tutored Tito in Marxism in prison, and had risen to be one of Tito’s highest advisers.2 By the late 1980s between five and six thousand Jews lived in Yugoslavia, mainly concentrated in the major cities such as Belgrade, Zagreb and Sarajevo.
Mandic’s emotive style may have been in poor taste but the society was initially greeted with enthusiasm – albeit guarded – by many Belgrade Jews. ‘What made this society attractive to the Jews was that the greatest Serbian writers, thinkers and philosophers joined and the many calls then to re-establish diplomatic relations with Israel,’ said Belgrade community leader Misa Levi. ‘But Milosevic tried to take advantage of this. He and the people around him thought that if he has Jews as friends, through this society, he would be able to influence the Jewish lobby in the United States, and make changes in American policy.’3
Milosevic himself was open and friendly to Yugoslav Jewish leaders such as Aca Singer, who knew Milosevic from their banking days. Singer met with Milosevic to discuss the restoration of Jewish property, and taking action against the rise in Serbian anti-Semitism. The Milosevic family home at Tolstoyeva 33 had once been owned by a Jewish publisher called Geca Kon, killed in the Holocaust, and was later nationalised. But Singer did not ask for its return, he recalled. ‘I said we are both bankers, let’s be rational, let’s see how many minutes you have for our talk. Milosevic said, “For you, time for talking is unlimited. I can talk with you for ten minutes, half an hour or half a day, so it’s up to you.” Milosevic asked me why I spent so much time in the Jewish community, and said that a banker like me was needed in Serbia.’4
Singer had already resisted attempts to recruit him in the era of pyramid schemes and hyperinflation. ‘I told him the Jewish community had financial problems, and we should get our property back.’ Here Milosevic immediately saw an opportunity. Singer recalled: ‘He said, “Look Aca, let’s not deal with this restitution now, but if you have financial problems, then let’s put the Jewish community on the books of the state budget to support you. We can arrange this.”’ But Singer, a survivor of both Auschwitz and Tito’s concentration camp at Goli Otok, was not taken in. ‘I said this was not a good idea, either for the Jewish community nor him. I told him that when I have contacts with world Jewish leaders, they will say that I am paid by Milosevic. We agreed to disagree about this and I insisted on the restitution of communal property. I didn’t mention Geca Kon. I didn’t want to sour the conversation. I was not asking for private property to be returned, but for community property. Milosevic said this would be OK.’
Singer also wanted a promise of adequate government action against the anti-Semitism in Serbia that was starting to appear, despite the best efforts of Klara Mandic. The two men spoke for three hours. ‘I had a positive feeling about Milosevic’s attitude towards Jews. I cannot say that Milosevic was anti-Semitic. Once I just glanced at my watch, I saw that thirty minutes had passed. He told me, please just continue with your talk. I said anti-Semitic books are being published and the judicial system was not doing anything about it.’ Milosevic then wrote a note to himself to call the Serbian Public Prosecutor, who soon called Singer. The two men met, but with no result, said Singer. ‘Two months went by, nothing happened. We wrote to the Serbian government. We said we wanted to add documents to our property restitution claim to Milosevic that he promised to forward to the government. We never had a reply and the issue is still unresolved.’
Mandic’s best ally in the war for Jewish public opinion was President Tudjman, who had proclaimed in the 1990 election campaign, ‘Thank God my wife is not a Jew or a Serb.’5 Tudjman decided to abolish the Croatian dinar and replace it with the kuna, the currency of the wartime Ustasha regime. Zagreb’s square commemorating the victims of fascism was renamed ‘The Square of Great Croatians’. Perhaps the crassest of all was the proposal, supported by Tudjman, to rebury the remains of wartime Ustasha with their victims at Jasenovac. The rationale behind this was a supposed ‘reconciliation’.
Tudjman’s book, Wastelands of Historical Reality, was so littered with anti-Semitism and Holocaust revisionism that foreign journalists in Belgrade were handed a leaflet with translated extracts. Tudjman, for example, suggested that Jews had helped run the Jasenovac concentration camp.6Israel refused to exchange ambassadors with Croatia while the book stayed in print. In the summer of 1991 the Zagreb Jewish community centre was severely damaged by a bomb attack. Tudjman ordered that the centre be rebuilt and restored to a new level of luxury and high security. The following year the centre re-opened with a gala party.
Behind the scenes Israel was quietly arranging the evacuation of those Yugoslav Jews who wanted to leave. Channels were opened to Milosevic, Tudjman and Alija Izetbegovic. All saw good relations with their own Jews as an important public relations exercise.7 As citizens of Yugoslavia and Croatia, Jews were, like everyone else, free to leave whenever they wanted. The problem was Bosnia. Sarajevo in particular, where most of the Jews lived, was besieged and cut off.
Israeli officials based in Budapest directed an international evacuation operation that would happily grace the pages of any thriller, featuring Israeli intelligence, Balkan warlords, dangerous missions across volatile front-lines and high-level international diplomacy. A letter was issued to all Yugoslav Jews, confirming their status. An arrangement was negotiated with the Hungarian government that the letter would be enough to guarantee passage across the border. All expenses would be paid until the person was sent on to Israel. Perhaps not surprisingly, this offer produced a substantial number of what were dubbed ‘instant Jews’, who suddenly rediscovered their ancestry. As one Jewish leader noted wryly, ‘Out of 1,200 Jews in Sarajevo, 3,000 have left.’8
Some of Sarajevo’s Jews were evacuated on the last Yugoslav planes out of the city, before the war started, with the help of the Yugoslav military. In Belgrade the Jewish community was allowed to run a radio station, with the call-sign ‘YU1JOB’ (Yugoslavia One Jewish Community of Belgrade) which transmitted messages to Sarajevo Jews twice a week. Not everyone departed, even from Sarajevo. There the city’s remaining community earned the respect of all three sides, by running a free soup kitchen, and a pharmacy. The departure of many of Sarajevo’s Jews was watched with regret by the Bosnian government. In 1992 it organised a celebration at the shell-scarred Holiday Inn hotel, to commemorate the five hundredth anniversary of the arrival of the Jews from Spain.
The friendship between Klara Mandic and Radovan Karadzic did not prevent Bosnian Serbs soldiers from desecrating Sarajevo’s ancient Jewish cemetery. The cemetery, which sits high on a hill overlooking the city, was ringed by mines and turned into a front-line position. Perched on the centuries-old gravestones of long vanished Sephardi dynasties, the Serbs swigged plum brandy and fired down into the city centre.
Tudjman pulled ahead of Milosevic by attending the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., on 22 April 1993. He was roundly booed. Just one week earlier, his client army, the Bosnian Croat HVO, had massacred over one hundred Bosnian Muslims at the village of Ahmici. And there was still no invitation to Jerusalem. He decided to make contact with the Israeli government. The man he chose for these sensitive missions was, naturally enough, Hrvoje Sarinic, his secret envoy to Milosevic. Sarinic recalled: ‘The Israelis were very against the setting-up of diplomatic relations. They thought Tudjman was a big Ustashe leader. I was in touch with the Israeli foreign ministry, and with some people from their intelligence services. I told them, you can have your opinion as far as Tudjman is concerned, but it is not in your interest to blame all the Croatian people.’9
In Jerusalem a growing body of opinion began to think that Sarinic was right. Israel was taking an increasing interest in the Yugoslav wars. Zagreb was a transit point for fighters from Arab and Islamic countries who joined the Bosnian army. The Dutch report into the fall of Srebrenica claimed that in exchange for free passage out for Bosnia’s Jews, Israel supplied arms to the Bosnian Serbs.10
Even so, Sarinic was told clearly, there would be no progress until Tudjman changed his book. ‘This became my personal battle with Tudjman. I told him, Mr President, if you want to go to Israel, and you want diplomatic relations, with your book as it is now, it is not possible, it is as simple as that. He said to me, “What do you want from me, you discuss my book, and then you say the same thing they do.” We worked on it, until he told me one day, “OK you can correct something, but only a little.” We pulled out about eighty pages.’ Sarinic presented the new version to the Israeli foreign ministry. It was accepted and full diplomatic relations were opened in the autumn of 1997.
As Mandic steered the SJFS further into the orbit of Serbian nationalists, the guarded welcome it had received within the Belgrade Jewish community faded. Mandic was also connected to Dafiment, the pyramid scheme run by Dafina Milanovic. The report of the Serbian Public Revenue Agency describes Mandic as Dafina’s ‘ambassador’.11 It became clear that the Society was exploiting a genuine goodwill among Serbs towards the Jews, for suspect political – and business – purposes. There were fears the whole venture could backfire, and trigger anti-Semitism from those disappointed by the ‘failure’ of the Jews to help the Serbs in their hour of need.
‘Klara Mandic’s role was positive in the beginning. She did a lot for relations between Serbia and Israel. Why should there not be a society in a country where there was not much anti-Semitism? She liked publicity, she was eloquent,’ said community leader Misa Levi.12
‘She was friendly with Karadzic, but when she realised she could take advantage of her easy access to him and to Milosevic, the problems began for us. But she got involved in politics and businesses with bad results, which were also bad for the Jewish community. At that stage most Jews withdrew. You can suffocate in such an embrace as this.’
Eventually, the SJFS faded away. Any vestigial sympathy most foreign Jews had for the Serb cause faded when news broke of the concentration camps in summer 1992. As for Klara Mandic, she was murdered in her apartment in Belgrade in May 2001.