My contribution to a Pesach seder
Vee and I are not religious, so Easter is nothing special for us, but many of our closest friends are Jewish and this year the Passover or Pesach festival almost coincides with Easter. We were invited to take part in a special meal called a seder to celebrate the festival of Pesach and felt honoured to be included in such an important religious and cultural event.
It is a long and elaborate ceremony, full of symbolism and historic references, and we followed most of the standard 15 elements. I confess that the traditional Pesach meal is not as appealing to me as the wonderful Christmas lunch – but sometimes one has to suffer in the interests of multiculturalism. A feature of the meal we attended was that participants are invited to speak about what the festival means to them. This was my contribution:
“For me, Pesach, Passover, the Feast of the Unleavened Bread is essentially about intolerance, about lack of respect for difference, about not allowing people to be themselves, even if that involves a different religion or a different culture or different behaviours and beliefs.
So it is not just about the Jews but about people of all religious beliefs and people of none.
It is not just about a faraway land like Egypt but about here in Europe snd here in London.
It is not just about what happened three millennia ago but what has happened in our lifetimes and what is happening now.
As an illustration of these messages, I invite you to remember that this week was the 20th anniversary of the start of the siege of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina and, at the time, part of the collapsing communist state of Yugoslavia.
The siege of Sarajevo lasted from 1992 to 1996 – an incredible 1,335 days or almost four years. It lasted three times longer than the siege of Stalingrad and a year longer than the siege of Leningrad in the Second World War.
An Orthodox Serb army surrounded a city made up mainly of Bosniak Muslims and Catholic Croats. A civilian population was subject to unrelenting mortar attack and sniper fire.
It is estimated that over 11,000 people were killed including over 1,500 children. A further 56,000 people were wounded including nearly 15,000 children.
This week, the main street of Sarajevo was lined with 11,541 empty red chairs, each one representing a death from the siege. Thousands of the red chairs were little ones representing the deaths of children.
In 2007, I visited Sarajevo with my sister Silvia. Time and time sgain we would see red resin splash marks on the pavements or in the road. Each filled the remnants of a mortar shell on the city. They are known as the Sarajevo roses.
What struck us was that the defining feature of Sarajevo over the ages was the religious mix of its population. We saw how even today within a short walk of each other is an Orthodox church, a Catholic cathedral, a Muslim mosque, and a Jewish synagogue – something that one can experience eslewhere in the world perhaps only in Jerusalem which Vee and I had visited only five months before with Eric and his son Yonatan.
The Sarajevo Synagogue was constructed in 1902 and is now the only functioning synagogue in the city. At the entrance, a stone menorah commemorates the 400 year anniversary of the Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Before the Second World War, there were some 11,000 Jews in the city who were so integrated that there was no ghetto. But some 90% of them were killed in the Holocaust- in this case, not by German Nazis but by Croatian fascist force called the Ustase.
The Holocaust occurred in the lifetime of our parents in our continent. Yet, in spite of this closeness of time and space, the siege of Sarajevo and the wider process of ethnic cleansing in the Balkan wars of the early 1990s could happen in our own lifetimes and again on our continent.
Will we ever learn? Will we ever accept each other with all our diffrences and all our richness?
We meet tonight in one of the most multicultural cities in the world: London.
We meet tonight on the eve of the most multinational event on the globe: the Olympic Games.
Yet, even here, even now, we have instances of intolerance.
Whether it is desecreation of Jewish cemeteries or synagogues.
Whether it is crude Islamphobia against our Muslim citizens
Whether it is blatant racism in the Metropolitan Police.Tonight we rededicate ourselves against intolerance – in all forms, in all places, in all times. Ultimately we are one family, one race, one world.”
April 10th, 2012 at 10:43 am
A very moving speech, Roger. Superbly put and an excellent link to have made.
The Bosnian War tells very plainly of how individuals can still be so easily divided and stirred up against each other on the basis of the difference of others – and, indeed, how intolerant we are as people, such that we allow that to happen. Because I think that is (largely) a conscious choice of individuals. It means that we have to be careful to look for the causes of intolerance within us; and it means that we are still so very far from accepting the wonderfully joyous world of difference in which we live.