c. 1999 Religion News Service

BELGRADE _ David Pesah, a Jew living in Belgrade, is a refugee, having escaped from ethnic fighting in Sarajevo by the skin of his teeth in 1992. Now that he and his wife, a Serb, are being bombed again, Pesah vows not to leave, not to emigrate to Israel and become a refugee twice over.”This bombing here is like child’s play,”said Pesah, 38, an unemployed telecommunications engineer.”In Sarajevo, we were getting 15 or 20 grenades thrown at our building in one minute.” He said Yugoslav friends and a strong attachment to Serb culture help keep him in Belgrade despite the promise of material comforts in Israel, where he is entitled to claim citizenship under the country’s Law of Return. He visited the Jewish State once in 1995.”The spirit is different there. Money is everything,”said Pesah, who, with income from his wife’s job, currently lives on $180 a month.”If I am just going to work all day and go directly into my pajamas when I get home, I’d rather be poor here and live life.” About 500 of Yugoslavia’s 3,500 Jews have fled the NATO attacks, mostly to Israel and neighboring Hungary. Those remaining often share Pesah’s feelings of solidarity with their Serb neighbors and indignation at what they perceive as U.S. and worldwide Jewish organizations’ endorsement of the NATO bombing.

For Pesah, comparisons of the Kosovars’ situation to that of the Jews in the Nazi Holocaust are particularly galling.”The American Jews don’t know what the Holocaust is. Maybe a few survivors but that’s all. I’m very disappointed in them,”said Pesah, an earnest man with a salt-and-pepper beard and wire-rimmed glasses.”If they call Kosovo genocide, then I compare Yugoslavia to Auschwitz. We are trapped and every night they pick a few people to kill.” Yugoslavia’s one active rabbi, Yitshak Asiel, uses milder terms to criticize those Jewish organizations that have backed NATO, terming such support”shameful”and”disappointing.”Asiel said he is deeply disturbed by a dehumanization of the Serb people that is part of a campaign to rally public opinion behind the NATO bombing.

To illustrate his point about the world’s isolation of the Serb people, Asiel quoted the Book of Numbers 23:9:,”It is a people that shall dwell alone and shall not be reckoned among the nations.” Asiel, 34, an Israeli-trained Orthodox rabbi, explained the reference,”It is about the Jews but now it is about the Serbs. The Western press does not treat the Serbs as a people. They are a tribe. They are primitive. They are killers. They have no rights and we can bomb them.” Asiel said he has assiduously avoided Yugoslav politics in his four-year tenure as rabbi but was called upon recently to speak to the group of U.S. religious leaders that visited Belgrade at the end of April and won the release of three American prisoners. To the clerics, too, Asiel said he criticized the West’s anti-Serb bias.”I said all these things when Jesse Jackson was here _ to his entire delegation,”said Asiel, relating how a rabbi in the delegation, Steven Jacobs of Los Angeles, later prompted him to speak openly.”Because I am here I have no credibility. I must not be objective. I am from here so I must be saying what the government tells me to.” Asiel, whose wife is an American, said the government has not asked him to make any statements on its behalf and generally takes little note of religious groups. Indeed, Asiel served 37 days in the Yugoslav Army after being mobilized in March along with thousands of other men. Just before Passover, partly in response to a letter from the head of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Pavle, military officials released Asiel because he is the country’s only rabbi.

On departing his Army communications unit, Asiel, a gentle-mannered, scholarly looking man trained as a ritual slaughterer, gave the other soldiers 20 kilograms of beef with which they threw a farewell party. He described Jewish-Serbian relations generally as superb and said anti-Semitism is virtually undetectable.

For his part, Pesah complained that Serb enthusiasm for Jews is sometimes too exuberant.”They are very proud when they have a Jewish friend. Sometimes, I would get angry with them and say, `OK, you are proud, but you don’t have to mention it in everyplace like I am some kind of special animal,'”said Pesah, adding that he has heard some Serbs claim their people to be one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.

One leader of Belgrade’s Jewish community, Alexander Lebl, cautioned that such intense feelings might easily flip the other way, especially during such a volatile time in Yugoslav society.

He summed up one strain of thought:”If we are nice to our Jews, that will help us in Israel and in America with the Jews there. But that could shift overnight and we could be reproached for not doing enough.” Lebl, 77, a retired journalist, said the Serb media’s choices of when to identify a world figure as Jewish or not was telling.”They are very anti-Semitic when it comes to American Jews _ Holbrooke, Allbright, Cohen and now Clark,”he said, refering special envoy Richard Holbrooke, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Secretary of Defense William Cohen and NATO’s supreme commander, Gen. Wesley Clark.”But those who are pro-Serb, like (playwright) Harold Pinter, are not Jewish but, in his case, British.” In Yugoslavia, the dominant religious force is the Serbian Orthodox Church, which by some estimates can claim 45 percent of Serbs as adherents. Under the leadership of Pavle, the church has maintained warm relations with other faiths in Yugoslavia, supported a pluralistic society and strongly criticized the polarizing policies of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Within the church, however, some fringe elements interpret NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia as a”Judeo-Masonic”scheme to impose a New World Order. One proponent of the theory, the Rev. Zarko Gavrilovic, is the author of 20 books on Serbian church history and theology and is currently leading a nine-member team in compiling an”Encyclopedia of Orthodoxy.”He is also a fierce critic of the Serbian Church for what he calls its collaboration with the Milosevic government.

In an interview in his Belgrade apartment, Gavrilovic, 67, refused to name local Jewish participants in the Judeo-Masonic effort at world domination. He said that he has respect for Jews generally.”Our God was born of that nation,”the Oxford-educated Gavrilovic said.”We are obliged to that nation for that.”Some of them are very good. Moses’ people of the Pentateuch are very good. But the Talmudic people, they are the Jewish people (who) would like to govern the world.”He claimed the Talmud calls for the”crushing of Christianity.”DEA END BROWN