Shul News & Notes

To highlight the holiday of Passover this year, The Shofar brings you an unusual story — the nomadic history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, one of the oldest Sephardic Haggadahs in the world, having originated in Barcelona around 1350. The Haggadah currently is owned by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, its monetary value estimated at about $7 million.

The Haggadah is handwritten on bleached calfskin and illuminated in copper and gold. It opens with 34 illustrated pages of key scenes in the Bible, from creation through the death of Moses. Its pages are stained with wine, evidence that it was used at many Passover Seders. The Haggadah is included in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

What draws the inquisitive to the story of this Haggadah is the many close calls it survived. Historians believe it was taken out of the Iberian Peninsula by Jews who were expelled by the Alhambra Decree in 1492. It remained hidden for centuries, but notes in the margins of the Haggadah indicate that it surfaced in Italy in the 16th century, and was ultimately sold to the National Museum in Sarajevo in 1894 by Joseph Kohen, although little is known about Kohen or how he came into possession of the document.

During World War II, the manuscript was again hidden, this time from the Nazis by the museum’s chief librarian, Derviš Korkut, who smuggled the Haggadah out of Sarajevo. Korkut gave it to a Muslim cleric who hid it in a mosque. In 1957, a facsimile of the Haggadah was published by Sándor Scheiber, director of the Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest.

In 1992 during the Bosnian War, the Haggadah manuscript survived a museum break-in. During the investigation, police discovered it on the floor with other items the thieves believed were not valuable. It was hidden again in an underground bank vault during the Siege of Sarajevo by Serb forces. To quell rumors that the government had sold the Haggadah in order to buy weapons, the president of Bosnia presented the manuscript at a community Seder in 1995.

In 2001, concerned about the deterioration of the Sarajevo Haggadah, which was then stored in a city bank vault under supposedly less than ideal conditions, Dr. Jakob Finci, the head of Sarajevo’s Jewish community, appealed to Jacques Paul Klein, the special representative of the Secretary General and Coordinator of United Nations Operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, for his assistance in ensuring the preservation and restoration of this priceless historical treasure. Klein quickly agreed to help by developing a plan to secure the required funding, identify an internationally recognized expert to undertake the restoration, and make space available in the United Nations Headquarters building, where the restoration efforts could begin.

However, when the project became public knowledge, some local Bosnian officials were reluctant to support it. But once President Itzobegovic was informed of the obstructionism and advised that the international community likely would take a dim view of the lack of cooperation in the restoration efforts, the way was cleared for the restoration project to begin. Jacques Paul Klein reinstated an international campaign to raise the required funding. Contributions came from individuals, institutions, and governments around the world. With funding in hand, a climate-controlled room was refurbished in Sarajevo’s National Museum to house the Haggadah as the centerpiece, surrounded by documents of the Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim faiths.

On December 2, 2002, the vault room was dedicated by the special representative of the Secretary General in the presence of senior Bosnian government officials, the diplomatic community, the international media, and the public. The Sarajevo Haggadah and other sacred and historical religious documents had, at last, found a worthy home.

In 1985, a reproduction was printed in Ljubljana, with 5,000 copies made. The National Museum subsequently authorized the publication of a limited number of reproductions, and in May 2006, the Sarajevo publishing house, Rabic Ltd., announced the forthcoming publication of 613 copies of the Haggadah, alluding to the 613 mitzvot. The copies are on handmade parchment that attempts to recreate the appearance of the 14th-century original.

A copy of the Sarajevo Haggadah was given to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair by the Grand Mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Mustafa Cerić, during the awards ceremony for the Tony Blair Faith Foundation’s Faith Shorts competition in December 2011. The Grand Mufti presented it as a symbol of interfaith cooperation and respect. The Grand Mufti presented another copy to a representative of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel during the interfaith meeting “Living Together is the Future,” organized in Sarajevo by the Community of Sant’Egidio.

In October 2012, the Haggadah’s future was left in limbo, following a drought in funding for the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had shuttered its doors in bankruptcy. However, in September 2015, following an intense campaign for funding, the museum reopened, and the Haggadah is again on display.

The Shofar is indebted to shul member Francis Dubois for sharing the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah and its survival. Many individuals recognized and protected this treasured artifact of Jewish history, including his friend and United Nations colleague, Jacques Paul Klein.