Dodik and SNSD don't give money for cultural institutions but would give the Sarajevo Haggadah to Israel, this plan must be thwarted!

(Patria) - SNSD President Milorad Dodik, during his visit to Israel, stated that he would propose returning the Sarajevo Haggadah, kept at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to Israel.

And while the SNSD's policy does not allow for the financing of seven institutions of state importance, this does not prevent Dodik from attempting to seize one of the most valuable exhibits held by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This attempt must be immediately thwarted, both by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and with the opposition of the Jewish Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as by politicians who must not allow the Haggadah to be brought into this context ever again.

In 1894, the National Museum purchased the Sarajevo Haggadah from the Sarajevo Sephardic Koen family for the sum of 150 kronen. From Sarajevo, it was sent for analysis to Vienna, from where, after certain complications, it was returned after a few years. True to its fate, the Sarajevo Haggadah does not find lasting peace even in the museum collection. In the first days after the entry of German military forces into Sarajevo in 1941, their authorities demanded that the then well-known leather codex be handed over to them by the then director Jozo Petrović. Petrović, with the help of curator Derviš Korkut, and at great risk, managed to evade this demand, and the Haggadah was hidden in a safer place, according to credible accounts, in a mosque in a Muslim village on the Bjelašnica mountain, where it remained until the end of World War II.

The next attempt at alienation occurred in the fifties of the last century when museum workers of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina prevented its theft, and hopefully, for the last time, this valuable manuscript was endangered at the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, when the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina found itself on the front line of the city's defense and suffered heavy destruction, from which it has not yet fully recovered. The Sarajevo Haggadah is exhibited and available to the wider cultural public in a specially secured space under precisely defined conditions.

The presented facts about the Sarajevo Haggadah, both those obtained through analysis and research, and those known to us through brief notes written on its pages, as well as through traditions that have accompanied it for decades, make this book an invaluable source for researching the cultural past of Jews in their centuries-long search for a homeland, and a living testament to the openness of a society and environment in which the fear of the different has never been an incurable disease, according to a statement on the website of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.