Eli Tauber walks through his native Sarajevo. Every few minutes, passers-by warmly greet him. A bit of small talk, and an occasional arrangement is made. Always kind, always smiling. That in itself would not be anything unusual, but still, it is worth noting. Because 75-year-old Tauber is a Jew.
Is he afraid of antisemitism when he moves through the streets of the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where the majority of the population is Muslim? Eli Tauber smiles. “No. Here we live with everyone in peace, and we are a harmonious community.”
In BiH, Jewish life has for 500 years been an assumed part of the social fabric. In front of the Jewish Museum in Sarajevo, there is no guard, no fences protect the entrance, and there is no police anywhere nearby.
The museum is located in a Sephardic synagogue built in 1581. Sephardim, Jews from Spain and Portugal, were expelled from their homeland in 1492. Around 1530, at the invitation of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, about 30 Sephardic families settled in Sarajevo, which at the time belonged to the Ottoman Empire.
The only fully preserved Haggadah
Eli Tauber is a historian, publicist, advisor for culture and religion at the Union of Jewish Communities, director of the Archives of the Jewish Community of BiH, and also the founder and president of the association “Haggadah Sarajevo”, which is named after a book.
The Haggadah unites text, ritual, and narrative about the memory of the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt and makes it a living part of Jewish identity. The Sarajevo Haggadah is the only fully preserved copy: it survived the Inquisition in medieval Italy, and during the Second World War it was saved from the Nazis by the Muslim scholar Dervis Korkut (theologian, orientalist, librarian, and the Travnik mufti of Turkish origin).
Night of the Sephardim
Tauber is also the founder of one of the better-known cultural manifestations in Sarajevo. The “Night of the Sephardim” originated from an idea of the then director of the Jewish Museum, Mevlida Serdarevic, a Muslim woman. In 2025, the event marked 20 years of existence.
A band from Spain, the original homeland of many Sephardim, played Sephardic music in front of about 700 guests, and songs were sung in Ladino, a language also called Judeo-Spanish, which Iberian Jews brought with them to the western Balkans and preserved to this day.
Shared life and an open community
Tauber says that Jewish families from the very beginning lived together with members of other religions in different city neighbourhoods. They shared trades, neighbourhood life, and celebrations. There were never any ghettos. Only in the Sarajevo neighbourhood of Bjelave was almost every second house Jewish. “Not by force,” Tauber explains, “but because the sun shone there the longest.” Sarajevo lies in a valley, surrounded by seven mountains. Whoever lives on the “wrong side”, especially in winter, lives in shadow, without sun, and in the cold.
Before the Holocaust, around 12.000 Jews lived in Sarajevo. After the end of the war in 1945, about 2.000 remained, many of whom emigrated after the war, mostly to Israel. At the beginning and during the war in BiH (1992-1995), many other Jewish families also left the country.
Sephardim, Ashkenazi, Muslims
Today, only about 500 to 700 Jews live in BiH. Around 70 percent are Sephardim, and the rest are Ashkenazi, Central European Jews who arrived after the annexation of the country by Austria-Hungary in 1878. In the Jewish community in Sarajevo, Sephardim and Ashkenazi celebrate holidays together, which was not always self-evident.
“The biggest difference was in the language,” Tauber explains, “Sephardim spoke Ladino, Ashkenazi Yiddish. But over time, both learned Bosnian, and since then, holidays are celebrated together, and intermarriages take place.” Tauber’s own family is also ‘mixed’: his mother was a Sephardic Jew, and his father was a child from a Sephardic-Ashkenazi marriage.
For someone to belong to the Jewish community in BiH, it is not absolutely necessary to convert to Judaism. This community is considered a historically formed community of shared fate and solidarity. In that context, Tauber tells the story of Fata Finci, a Muslim woman and friend of his mother, who was married to a Jew and remained an active member of the community until her death.
An archive against forgetting
In his book “When Neighbors Were Real Human Beings”, Tauber collected stories from the time of the Nazi occupation of Bosnia. He shows a historical photograph: in occupied Sarajevo, the Muslim woman Zejneba Hardaga covers the Star of David on the arm of the Jewish woman Rivka Kabilio with her coat.
The Hardaga family saved the Kabilio family from the Holocaust, and later was awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations”. In 1994, during the siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian war, Zejneba Hardaga, her daughter, and son-in-law, thanks to the Kabilio family, went to Israel, where Zejneba later died and where she was buried.
A Catholic woman saved Tauber’s mother
The family history of Tauber himself is also marked by an act of rescue. “This woman saved my mother,” he says and points to a photograph of Zora Krajina, a Catholic. In 1941, she took Tauber’s mother from Sarajevo to Mostar, from where she then escaped to the Croatian island of Hvar.
Tauber wants to preserve such stories. That is why the Jewish community is building an archive that collects and digitizes documents scattered around the world. Thousands of scanned documents have already arrived from Serbia, Israel, France, and the United States (U.S.). The goal is that by 2030, on the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Sephardim, a comprehensive history of Jews in BiH will be presented.
Another undertaking is the so-called geniza: a storage place for worn-out sacred texts. “Among us Jews, books are not thrown away, but buried,” Tauber explains. The Sephardic scholar Zeki Effendi (1845-1916) from Sarajevo had such a geniza arranged and planned to open it years later, but died the day before the planned date. Tauber researched this and has an assumption of where the geniza could be located: “It only still needs to be proven that it is really there.” He hopes to find valuable historical testimonies there.
Coexistence and an open society
Before we said goodbye, Tauber smiles mischievously: “The Sephardic synagogue in Sarajevo is not oriented toward Jerusalem, but toward Mecca – out of respect for the Ottoman, Muslim authority that provided protection to the Jews.” This, he says, can be proven by its architectural orientation, which corresponds to the orientationof the neighbouring Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque.
“Our multicultural community here in Bosnia is a precious heritage that must be preserved,” says Tauber, and emphasizes that it is “an example for Europe.” The current Middle Eastern conflict, he adds, does not change that. Pro-Palestinian protests in Sarajevo are held regularly, but never in front of Jewish institutions. “Out of respect,” says Tauber, “because here it is known that we have nothing to do with that war.”, DW writes.
