c. 1999 Religion News Service

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia _ Just hours before this city erupted in spontaneous, noisy celebrations marking the peace agreement reached last week, two families arrived on a cramped bus from the Kosovo city of Prizren, the first of the embattled province’s tiny Jewish community to make it out.

After enduring 77 days of bombing and finally a 10-hour bus ride that usually takes five, the six adults and one child seemed relieved to be lodged in a modest hotel, eating three square meals a day and sleeping soundly.”We couldn’t really say we slept for those two and a half months,”said Gulten Gasi, 42, a mother of two grown sons.”We took naps between the bombs.”Belgrade is the refugees’ first stop on a journey to Israel.

According to Jewish leaders here, another 56 Jews remain in Kosovo. None were injured during the NATO bombing or fighting between Serb soldiers and Kosovar separatists; nor was any Jewish property damaged.

But Gasi predicted the remainder of Kosovo’s Jews will also soon leave _ primarily for economic reasons. She, for example, lost her 300 dinar ($16) a month job in a shoe factory when it was bombed.

Other Kosovo Jews, she said, are likely to wait until they can depart in a more dignified way. Gasi’s family were permitted to carry only a small bag on the bus to Belgrade.”When the situation becomes normal, we will return and sell the house and the belongings,”said Gasi, a short woman with a sandpapery voice explaining that her husband’s family would look after their property in the meantime.

Each of the refugees was loathe to talk of the bombing or the ethnic violence that ravaged Kosovo and helped drive nearly 1 million ethnic Albanians out of the region. They politely but adamantly avoided a reporter’s queries about what they might have seen or heard during the bombardment.”We can’t answer your questions because we were locked in the house the whole time,”said Gulten’s husband Resat Gasi, 45, a quiet man with a sweet smile who had worked as a car mechanic.

Resat Gasi, an ethnic Turk whose wife is a Turkish-speaking Jew, said elderly members of his extended family were delegated to brave the bombs and do the shopping because they had less of life ahead of them.

Within Kosovo, Prizren, with 120,000 residents, has a reputation as a city much less afflicted with the ethnic tensions that have generally wracked the province of 2 million people. The Gasis said 90 percent of the city speaks Turkish, which is the family’s first language, followed by the Serbian and Albanian tongues, respectively.

Before the two families’ departure, Prizren had 23 Jews with another 40 in Kosovo’s capital of Pristina. Like other especially small ethnic minorities on the sidelines of the Serb-Albanian Muslim conflict, Jews have avoided getting caught up in the politics and the violence.

Generally, leaders of Yugoslavia’s 3,500-member Jewish community have loudly denounced the NATO action as unwarranted and criminal. They have also criticized the response of those Western Jewish organizations that have likened the plight of the Kosovars to that of Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

Of Yugoslavia’s pre-bombing Jewish population, 546 women, children and elderly left the country fairly early in the conflict, seeking refuge mostly in Israel and Budapest, said Miroslav Grinvald, secretary of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Yugoslavia. As a way of maintaining Yugoslavia’s military readiness, men between the ages of 18 and 65 are not allowed to leave the country.

Grinvald predicted the majority of those Jews who fled Yugoslavia will opt to return. He said the federation is committed to helping them with food, medicine and possibly employment at a time when the economy is in tatters, infrastructure and factories destroyed and rates of inflation and unemployment growing by leaps and bounds.

For the duration of the NATO bombing campaign, Grinvald said it was impossible to send aid to Kosovo’s Jews because of the danger of attack and the ruined roads and bridges.

In Prizren, Mikus Zlta, 28, Gulten Gasi’s younger brother, said that with sugar or cooking oil unavailable from the first days of the bombing, local residents would take considerable risks to get other staples.”From two or three in the morning until three o’clock in the afternoon, they would stand in line for the two loaves of bread each person was allowed,”said Zlta, a short, round-faced man who played the tambura, a Turkish stringed instrument, in Serbian state television’s local orchestra in Prizren.

Zlta’s wife, Mediha, 24, is seven months pregnant and said she worried constantly during the bombing about her unborn baby:”I asked myself if it was the right time to bring a child into the world.” The refugees said they were”never really hungry,”eating mostly locally produced bread and cheese and, when it was available, tinned meat and pasta shipped from Greece as humanitarian aid.”Prizren is in the southernmost part of Kosovo, so the supplies would reach us last,”said Tarkan Gasi, 23, one of the Gasi’s two sons who is trained as a computer operator.

In Israel, Tarkan Gasi said jokingly, he dreams about a new life and finding a”wife who is rich.”One of the families’ first tasks will be to learn Hebrew. In the meantime, they will rely on Turkish-speaking kin living in Haifa and Tel Aviv.”We called our relatives today in Israel. They cried when we told them we would be there in a week,”said Gulten Gasi, with a broad smile.”They cried when they heard this. For three months, they had no contact with us, so they didn’t know what had happened.”DEA END BROWN