Rabbi Asiel: Seizing Kosovo is a dangerous precedent that will return like a boomerang to those who decided to do it

The rabbi of the Jewish community in Serbia, Isaac Asiel, says that the old Jews used to say that seizing Kosovo is a dangerous precedent that will one day return like a boomerang to those who decided to do it, Mondo reports.

Rabbi Isaac Asiel said in the show "Licno sa Petrom Latinovic" that he remembered the time when he had assumed the office of a rabbi on March 1, 1995, as very turbulent.

"That year was the exodus of Serbs from Krajina. This followed us until 1999 when there was a bombing by NATO. Then, as a former midshipman in the Yugoslav People’s Army, I received a call to which I responded," Isaac Asiel says.

When asked if he could have refused the invitation, he said that it would not be appropriate.

"I thought it was inappropriate to refuse. I didn't even want to refuse. I always relied on God in my life and I thought that it was some kind of decree from above and that it was for something good. My comrades did not know who I was. In the beginning, I hid it a little bit. And then when they wanted to give me a rank, I tried to pretend it somehow. And then they asked me - so, what, are you some kind of a priest?! I said, in a way - Jewish," Asiel said.

It should be recalled that according to the Jewish calendar, the Serbian exodus in 1995 began on the eve of the 9th of Av, the day and month when both the First and Second Jewish Temples were destroyed. On that day, they were expelled from Spain, and the first gas chamber in Auschwitz was opened on the 9th of Av.

About the strong symbolism of this date, Rabbi Isaac Asiel says that all great tragedies happened on that date.

"At that time, I lived on Sajkaska Street. I was a witness; I heard and saw all those horse-drawn carriages passing nearby. And indeed, there was a time when we were preparing to mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples. All great Jewish tragedies happened on the 9th of Av. All of that is true. Then I felt that we had to address the patriarch of that time with a letter. And we sent that letter as a deep sign of understanding and sympathy with what is happening with the Serbian people," Asiel said.

Just a few days before the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Asiel said that in the ideology of the leader of Nazism, there had been a whole scale of people.

"Slavic peoples in that ideology were labeled as "Untermenschen" - that is, subhuman - but still useful for some kind of work. However, Jews were equated with vermin. And vermin should be destroyed. Jews were all the metaphysical evil of this world and actually, Hitler's war was a war against the Jews.

He never hid it, he even announced it. The madness of that hatred manifested itself until the end of the war. Now that we are talking about January 27, you can see the situation Serbia is in. I am not dealing with politics, but as a citizen of this country, some parallels emerge. No one wants to listen to our side of the story, the logic of seizing Kosovo, which the old Jews I spoke with said a long time ago that this was a dangerous precedent that would one day return like a boomerang to those who had decided to do that. We now have these tensions that this is a unique case, but it is an inexorable logic. Now the Serbian state is getting into a situation where no one wants to listen," Asiel said.