Ivan Ceresnjes - Jewish Community Leader

Jewish Community Leader

Ceresnjes served as head of the Jewish community of Bosnia and Herzegovina and vice-chairman of the Yugoslav Federation of Jewish Communities from 1992 until his emigration to Israel in 1996. His tenure coincided with the Bosnian War of 1992–1995. When Serbian forces occupied the Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo, Ceresnjes gave permission to the Bosnia-Herzegovinan army to bomb the cemetery. (In the end, the cemetery was not bombed.)

Ceresnjes and the Sarajevo Jewish humanitarian society, La Benevolencija, also provided aid to thousands of besieged Catholic, Muslim, Orthodox Christian and Jewish residents, supplying food, medicine, and postal and radio communications. Ceresnjes told a local paper that the nonsectarian relief effort was partly a gesture of gratitude to local Muslims who had hidden Jews during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia. As a student of Balkan history, Ceresnjes said he had anticipated the war a full year before it broke out, and had organized the Jewish community of Sarajevo to stockpile supplies, make sure everyone had passports, make plans to evacuate the children and the elderly, and find places for the evacuees in Israel and Europe. After the war started, Ceresnjes and La Benevolencija assisted the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in the evacuation of 2,500 Sarajevo residents, only one-third of whom were Jewish. There were 11 evacuations in all, three by air early on in the war, and eight by bus convoy after the airport had been closed to civilian traffic. While other convoys were stopped, the Ceresnjes convoys all got through, as field staff from the Joint negotiated cease fires to ensure safe transfer.

In recognition of his wartime humanitarian efforts, Ceresnjes was awarded the French Légion d'honneur in October 1994. He published his wartime memoirs in a 35-page monograph, Caught in the winds of war: Jews in the former Yugoslavia, in 1999.