Posted on 05/26/2004 8:03:58 AM PDT by SJackson
NIS, Serbia and Montenegro (Reuters) - Dzema Abdulovic lives with other Gypsies above the dead in an old Jewish cemetery in Serbia, his family using a sarcophagus as a table in their front yard.
"My father and grandfather both lived here," said the 35-year-old outside his home in a former graveyard chapel on the outskirts of the southern town of Nis. "It's peaceful."
His wife Ljubinka said she was not spooked. "I don't see any vampires," she laughed, standing next to the stone coffin where a rabbi was buried many years ago. "It is a good house."
But the decades-old Gypsy, or Roma, settlement and the generally derelict state of the cemetery have shocked Jews in Serbia and elsewhere.
They want the authorities to help clean up and restore what they see as sacred ground and find new homes for Roma families who have built roughly 80 houses covering a large section.
Faded and cracked tombstones, some with rare symbols puzzling experts, lie among weeds and heaps of garbage. Others were reportedly used in the foundationa of houses. The surfaces of a few are discernible in neighborhood alleys.
"There are graves there from the 17th century," said Davor Shalom, secretary of the Jewish communities of Serbia and Montenegro. "It is completely desecrated and destroyed."
Ivan Ceresnjes, an architect historian at the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said he was sickened by what he saw when he first visited a year ago.
"Not a single one in any of the regions I visited, and I visited some 400 Jewish cemeteries, is in such a catastrophic state as the Jewish cemetery in Nis," he wrote in a protest letter to the municipality in December.
GRAVEYARD TOWN
The first Roma settled at the cemetery sometime after World War II, when most of Nis's Jews were killed during Nazi Germany's occupation of the Balkan country. It gradually grew into a community of about 300 people.
Like Roma elsewhere, most inhabitants live in poor and squalid conditions. But there are also a few three-story brick houses sporting satellite television dishes and with cars parked in front. "It is like a small town," said Jasmina Ciric, leader of the 45-member Jewish community in Nis, one of Serbia's largest cities with 235,000 people, including thousands of Roma.
She campaigns for the restoration of the cemetery, where the last funeral took place before Germany invaded Serbia in 1941. Jews have since been buried in Nis's Christian Orthodox graveyard or in the Jewish cemetery in the capital Belgrade.
"It is holy ground for me. I want to be buried here," Ciric said as a horse grazed among tombstones nearby and pigs rooted for food on the other side of a rusty fence.
Ciric, who has become friends with the Roma inhabitants, said they would put their sick children in a broken sarcophagus, believing it had healing powers.
She said some memorial stones were damaged when a neighboring company erected a wall to separate its land from the cemetery. "It is in a very bad condition."
Ceresnjes, who headed the Jewish community in neighboring Bosnia during its 1992-95 war, said lack of inscriptions identifying the dead combined with symbols such as snakes on some of the tombstones made the cemetery unique.
"This is definitely very strange. It is a kind of message from one generation to another that we have to decipher," he said by phone. "It is maybe a local mystic tradition."
CITY SEEKS SOLUTION
Local authorities have vowed to help resolve the situation, setting up a working group last year with Roma and Jewish representatives given the task of drafting an action plan.
"We are shocked and distressed by the condition of the centuries-old Jewish cemetery," Toplica Djordjevic, head of the Nis city government, said after a visit in late 2003.
Senior official Ninoslav Krstic said Nis planned to build a new settlement for the Roma but the cash-strapped municipality would need outside financial help.
"Let's be honest. We don't have the money," he said. Ciric said the Roma, a minority in Serbia's 8 million population, would be willing to move to somewhere with running water and sanitation.
"If the municipality gives me a new house I would like to move for the sake of the children," said Jasko Salijevic, 53, saying he had one tombstone in his house and another in the horse's stable. "People don't like to live on a cemetery."
If you'd like to be on or off this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.
In the words of the immortal Cher, "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves....."
That's an interesting article.
They sure do need to keep the pigs out of there, though.
That's GOTTA be desecration.
"We are broke" would be more accurate statement. In 1999 when BJ Clinton attacked Serbia on behalf of Al Qaeda's Albanian alies, Nish was one of the most heavilly bombed targets. Cluster bombing of marketplace , tobacco factory, residential dwellings, you get the picture.
The livelihood of Nish inhabitants was destroyed. And city goverment had to cater to influx of refugees from Kosovo.
Another Clinton legacy
In WWII Croatia, Serbs, Jews and Roma were earmarked for extermination. Public announcement read "forbidden for Jews, Serbs, Gypsies and dogs"
The same thing is happening in Kosovo today. Albanians call Roma "majup" ("dirt"), kill them in impunity and loot their property. Thousands of Roma houses were torched down by Albanians in Kosovo.
Chances are that some of Nish Roma are refugees from Kosovo.
Roma are genocide victims and they need outside financial aid because Serbian ecconomy is destroyed by bombing and can not help them.
It is sickening to think about billions of dollars of aid squandered in UN-governed Kosovo and all that money given to Albanian terrorists as a reward for their crimes while Roma got zilch.
Roma definitelly are not the guilty ones and should not be demonized.
I agree. I don't think the article was blaming them at all, simply reporting on an unfortunate situation all the way around.
Having spent a fair amount of time in Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, I do think there are two sides to the Roma story. Basically what you've got there is a world-class chicken-and-egg argument that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years.
The Roma say "We're mistreated and we're poor. For these reasons we live the way we do."
The Gadjo (non-Gypsies) say "The Gypsies don't work, cheat and steal. For these reasons we treat them the way we do."
Basically they are both completely right, so far as I can tell.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.