Jerusalem
Dear Mr. President of The Republic of Israel
Dear Mr. Prime Minister of The Republic of Israel
Dear Mr. Chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate
On behalf of the Holy Synod of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox
Church and on Our own behalf We have the honor to congratulate to You and to
the Israeli People the 50th anniversary of existence of Yad Vashem
You are presiding over. Making efforts to preserve primarily the names of the
victims murdered in a historically unheard-of attempt to exterminate one entire
people, Yad Vashem had preserved the most precious gift God has given – human’s
own name, a sign of man’s eternal divine image. Only as so created man, Moses
was able to converse on Sinai with its Creator as a Person. That encounter has
laid fundaments for everything we call today Judeo-Christian civilisation.
Yad Vashem had preserved in this way memory of the Jewish people
as a universal personality and has not allowed it that those who were killed
in concentration camps due to their adherence to a specific people and a specific
religion should be forgotten. In the fight against the Communist regime, which
made efforts that the suffering human beings and peoples proclaimed as impersonal
victims of Fascism, nevertheless the truth prevailed. In that struggle that in
Serbian people exclusively the Serbian Orthodox Church was able to conduct, Yad
Vashem was a friendly and encouraging torch.
We congratulate also for the significant reward of the State of
Israel, which Yad Vashem received on this occasion and we do rejoice at its new
enlargement and image being realized in the recent few years.
At the same time, We express to You our deepest condolence on
the occasion of the most recent victims in Your country and the latest sufferings
of Your people. As they have done throughout history, the Serbs also today feel
a deep concern for the suffering of the people with whom they have felt in brotherly
links through their common life and common martyrdom, in the same way as we perceive
the suffering of every individual and every human being on this globe of earth,
according the biblical word that “the whole creation has been groaning in travail
waiting to obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God”.
The Second World War in Serbia brought the most cruel occupation
in Europe: as punishment for the rebel against the Nazi Germany, for one killed
German soldier hundreds were killed, and for one wounded – fifty citizens of
Serbia, which the Germany had already decimated in the First World War. The criminals
selected for murder both Serbs and Jews in the same way, and only for the reason
that it might be feasible that the occupants might boast of Serbia being “the
first country in Europe where the Jewish matter had been settled”, as they thought.
However, the Serbian people, despite of terrible threats, preserved their Jewish
co-brothers as far as it was feasible, and today we live again together, as “the
remnant of the slaughtered peoples”, as our poet used to say.
In Jasenovac, the bones of tens of thousands of still not innumerated
Serbian and Jewish victims have mixed them up with the graves, forever linking
with them also the memory of the Serbian and Jewish peoples. In the Hall of Memory
in Your Yad Vashem, Jasenovac found its place next to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
We hope that both Jasenovac and our common suffering will find their place also
in latest historic exposition in Yad Vashem, despite the fact that the most recent
Balkan tragedy, where unfortunately there were crimes committed in Serbian name,
was used by many as a pretext to hide and minimize the crime over the Serbs in
the Second World War, in which the roots of this recent conflict are to be found.
The Holy Synod of Bishops has founded this year a Committee of
he Serbian Orthodox Church for Jasenovac, the name of which for us Serbs has
become that of the New Babel, a symbol of the entire suffering during the Second
World War. The task and responsibility of this Committee is not exclusively the
preservation of memory on the victims of this concentration camp, according to
some people – the most terrible place of living and suffering – but also the
cooperation with all those in world that deal with the Holocaust, with the aim
the future generations understand even the origin of Jasenovac is a calamity
for the whole of Mankind.
While establishing this Committee we were led by the idea that
the Serbs due to the Communist rule and the recent war in the Balkans have not
managed to pay a worthy tribute to the victims of Holocaust and genocide in the
Second World War. In addition to it, there is ever present in the world an ununderstandable
inclination to use the sway of time and minimize Holocaust and push it into oblivion,
whereby those who behave so become co-participants in a committed crime. From
our own experience we know to what extent the hiding of truth on Holocaust and
genocide had effects in the latest Balkan tragedy. We have the intention to participate
in finding out and publishing of the truth on Jasenovac and the total suffering
in the Second World War, but at the first place we will do whatever possible
that in Donja Gradina, the place where the majority of Jasenovac were killed
and buried, a worthy monument be erected, which has not existed so far.
Wishing You all the best from the Lord God,
President of The Holy Synod of BishopsOf the Serbian Orthodox
Church
AM and Serbian Patriarch
Sign. PAVLE
[ Main page | Search
| News | Map | Contact | Help ]
