Following the example of other European cities such as Prague, Krakow, Vienna and Budapest that offer Jewish Prague, Jewish Vienna … Jewish Association Hagada and its partners organize the tourist offer of “Jewish Sarajevo”.
Hagada, as a non-governmental organization that aims to preserve Jewish culture and traditions and promotion of tourism potential in order to provide quality and comprehensive information to visitors of Sarajevo, decided to educated two tourist guides from the Jewish community. They trained guides for Hebrew and English language.
“The number of tourists that are coming to Sarajevo is greater every year and we need higher number of tourist guides who can lead the so-called “Jewish tour”. This is important for the city of Sarajevo since the story of Sarajevo is unimaginable without stories about Sarajevo Jews, the synagogue, the unique cemetery in Europe. Also, Sarajevo is unimaginable without one of the most valuable manuscript that it preserves, without Sarajevo Hagada. The story of Sarajevo Hagada is not just a story of a manuscript and its artistic and historical value. This is the story of the people, the citizens of Sarajevo, who have fought a century that this valuable manuscript remain in Sarajevo, to preserve and protect it,” said Eli Tauber, President of the Hagada.
There is also the old Jewish cemetery, a national cultural monument, which has just been nominated to be under the protection of UNESCO.
Sephard Jews live in Sarajevo for nearly 500 years, and they brought from Spain and Portugal their language, songs, cuisine and everything else that survived to this day. Part of it has become an inseparable part of the culture of Sarajevo, for example the song “When I went to Bentbasa” which is the original Sephardic synagogue song.
Association Hagada was established to preserve and promote Jewish culture and tradition, and because of all these reasons, as well as the immeasurable contribution of Jewish cultural, urban and economic development of the city of Sarajevo, they started the initiative of training of tourist guides in Sarajevo.
Sarajevo Development Agency SERDA also participates in this project, considering that education tourist guides of Sarajevo contributes, above all, to their economic stabilization, but the most important is that in this way raises the tourist offer of Sarajevo and makes Sarajevo the first in the Balkans on the map of large cities that have organized tourist offer “Jewish tour”.
(Source: klix.ba)
