Please mark your calendars
for a very special series of events...

San Diego State University's Jewish Studies Program's Initiative For Moral Courage is pleased and honored to present a unique series of events featuring internationally renowned photographers, filmmakers, musicians and activists.  The 5-day event will highlight the unique role of Sarajevo's Jewish community during the five year siege of the city some twenty years ago.

We hope you will take note of the events and dates below and join us for this important symposium.

Dr. Risa Levitt Kohn & Dr. Rebecca Moore, Initiative Co-Directors  
Julie Potiker, Symposium Community Chair

 With generous support from the Friends of the IMC and the Leichtag Family Foundation 

Photography Exhibition: "Survival in Sarajevo: Jews, Muslims, Serbs and Croats Working Together During the Bosnian War"

October 14th, 2012 through November 14th, 2012  
at SDSU's Love Library during regular library hours 

Some twenty years ago this year, the Bosnian-Serb siege of Sarajevo began. Lasting from 1992 through 1996, it is among the longest in modern history.  With electricity, water and food supplies cut off, Sarajevans had to learn to depend on each other.  As the siege raged, a group of Holocaust survivors and their offspring created La Benevolencija, the Jewish humanitarian aid agency. Their efforts, however, would reach different populations in the besieged city. 

La Benevolencija brought together Jews and Muslims, Serbian Orthodox and Catholic Croats -- people from different ethnic groups who worked together for the benefit of all. That they were operating a Jewish agency out of a faded, turn-of-the-century synagogue was not surprising.  After all Jews had lived alongside their neighbors since they were welcomed into Sarajevo in the 16th century.  Outside Sarajevo, Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic and Serb leader Radovan Karadzic insisted different ethnic groups could not live together.  Croatian leaders said the same, as did a few Muslims, but they would have been a minority.  That is why La Benevolencija's story -- one of many ad hoc humanitarian aid agencies operating in the war zone -- is so poignant.  Guided by Holocaust survivors and their children, these volunteers stood shoulder to shoulder with their neighbors, and shared with them a lesson Jews in Europe had been learning for centuries: how to survive.  

Based on the book by Edward Serotta, Survival in Sarajevo: Jews, Bosnia, and the Lessons of the Past, published in 1994 and now out of print, the Survival in Sarajevo exhibition documents the efforts of La Benevolencija as more than fifty volunteers came to work in the Jewish community center in Sarajevo every day. Who was a Jew? A Muslim? A Serb? A Croat? At La Benevolencija no one asked and no one cared. The exhibition exposes this beautiful story and shows why and how these people came together.  

The exhibition is created by Centropa, (Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation) a Vienna and Budapest-based non-profit NGO that uses advanced technologies to preserve Jewish memory in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and the Baltics and has been underwritten by JDC (the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) and The Milton and Rosyln Wolf Foundation.     

Saturday Evening, October 13th, 2012
Exhibition Opening & Reception at SDSU's Love Library (By Invitation)
with remarks by Edward Serotta and Jacob Finci.

Edward Serotta, Director, CENTROPA
"Survival in Sarajevo: Jews, Bosnia and the Lessons of the Past"

Sunday Morning, October 14th
11:00 AM
Fowler Family Ballroom, Parma Payne Goodall Alumni Center   

Edward Serotta is the Director of Centropa (Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation).  He is an American-born, Vienna-based photographer, filmmaker and writer who specializes in Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe. Between 1985 and 1996 Mr. Serotta photographed Jewish communities throughout the region, covering everything from Communist rallies to the revolutions that overthrew them; from the war in Bosnia to the Russian Jewish immigration to Germany. Between 1996 and 1999 he produced four twenty-five minute films for ABC News Nightline on Central European Jewry and has written on Jewish issues in Germany, Hungary, Austria and Bosnia for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, TIME, the Los Angeles Times, the London Independent and Die Zeit, and contributed an essay on Jewish photography in Eastern Europe to the Oxford University Companion Guide to the Photograph (2005).

Jakob Finci, President of La Benevolencija, and the Jewish Community of Bosnia Herzegovina
"The Sarajevo Haggada: Symbol of Hope" 

Sunday Afternoon, October 14th
1:00 PM 
Fowler Family Ballroom, Parma Payne Goodall Alumni Center     

Jakob Finci was born to a Jewish Sephardic family that had arrived in Sarajevo in the 16th century.  He graduated from Faculty of Law in Sarajevo and was a practicing lawyer specializing in international commercial law.  He was also active in Jewish community and at the beginning of 1991, became one of the founders of the Jewish cultural, educational and humanitarian society known as La Benevolencija.  During the war in Bosnia, Mr. Finci assumed his current position as President of La Benevolencija, and Vice President of the coordinating body of Bosnian NGOs. In August 1995 he became the first elected President of the Jewish Community of Bosnia Herzegovina.  In February 2000, he was elected Chairman of the Association of Citizens "Truth and Reconciliation" with the main goal of establishing a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Bosnia Herzegovina, and in February 2001 the UN High Representative appointed him to Chair the Constitutional Commission of Federal Parliament.  In May 2002, he was appointed by the High Representative as the first director of the State Agency for Civil Service and in March 2008, he was named as the Ambassador of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Switzerland, and non resident ambassador to Lichtenstein.

Film Screening: I Came to Testify with Writer/Producer Pamela Hogan

Sunday Afternoon, October 14th
3:00 PM
Fowler Family Ballroom, Parma Payne Goodall Alumni Center

I Came to Testify, is part of the PBS series Women, War & Peace.  When the Balkans exploded into war in the 1990s, reports that tens of thousands of women were being systematically raped as a tactic of ethnic cleansing captured the international spotlight.  I Came to Testify is the moving story of how a group of 16 women who had been imprisoned by Serb-led forces in the Bosnian town of Foca broke history's great silence and stepped forward to take the witness stand in an international court of law.   

Pamela Hogan is an award-winning director, producer, writer and executive producer of documentaries with 25 years of experience in television and independent filmmaking.  She is Co-Creator and Executive Producer of the five-part PBS series Women, War & Peace, as well as Producer/Writer of episode 1, I Came to Testify, which has been honored with the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel award recognizing outstanding work that fosters the American public's understanding of law and the legal system.  She is the winner of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant (for Women, War & Peace's I Came to Testify) and is an honoree of the National Council for Research on Women's "Making a Difference for Women" campaign.  Her speaking engagements include Harvard's Askwith Forum, the White House, the Asia Society, Berkeley Law School, the U.N., Brown's Watson Institute, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Council on Foreign Relations.  She holds degrees from Harvard and Columbia, and is a member of the Directors Guild of America and the Writers Guild of America.

Film Screening: Grbavica: Land of My Dreams with Dr. Lawrence Baron, SDSU 

Monday Evening, October 15th
7:00 PM
Auditorium, Fowler Athletic Center   

Grbavica: Land of My Dreams: In her stunning debut feature, writer/director Jasmila Zbaniae explores the painful long-term effects of war on a Bosnian woman and her daughter.  Esma is a single mother who lives with her 12-year old daughter, Sara, in the Grbavica district of Sarajevo; a neighborhood once used as an internment camp during the Yugoslav wars.  Unable to get by on government aid, Esma works two jobs to make ends meet.  When Sara wants to go on a school trip, questions arise about her father, who is supposed to have died as a war martyr.  Gradually, Sara comes to realize that her mother has never told her the truth about the war years, and the truth threatens to tear them apart.  Winner of the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival.

Dr. Lawrence Baron was the Nasatir Chair of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University from 1988 until his retirement in the Spring of 2012. He directed its Jewish Studies Program until 2006. He received his Ph.D. in modern European cultural and intellectual history from the University of Wisconsinwhere he studied with George L. Mosse.  He taught at St. Lawrence University from 1975 until 1988 and has authored four books including The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011) and Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005).  He served as the historian and an interviewer for Sam and Pearl Oliner's The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe.  In 2006, he delivered the keynote address for Yad Vashem's first conference devoted to Hollywood and the Holocaust.  His contribution to Holocaust Studies was recently profiled in Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide (Routledge: 2010) by Paul Bartrop and  Steven Jacobs.  He is the founder and current president of the Western Jewish Studies Association.

Closing Musical Event
Featuring SDSU Artist in Residence Yale Strom
"The Songs of Sarajevo: Music of the Jews, Muslims and Christians"

Wednesday Evening, October 17th
7:00 PM 
Rhapsody Hall, Music Building

The musical finale will feature an ensemble would of reeds (flutes, clarinets and saxophones), accordion, Middle Eastern and Balkan percussion, bass (bouzouki),vocals, violin and guitar. Playing Jewish, Roma, Serbian, Bosnian, Croat, Greek and Turkish  tunes sung in Ladino and Romani.

Performers include:

Fred Benedetti - guitar
Lou Fanuchhi - accordion
Jamie Papish - percussion
Jeff Pekarek  - bass/bouzouki
Elizabeth Schwartz - vocals
Norbert Stachel - reeds  
Peter Stan - accordion 
Yale Strom - violin