Vedrana Rudan, a renowned Croatian journalist and writer, uses her public stature in order to promote anti-Semitism in Croatia. She is famous for her radical and unconventional opinions, vulgar language, showy public appearances, politically incorrect speech, and for never holding anything back. Her blunt view of current events has gained her notice and popularity, which she constantly uses to promote anti-Semitic views and Jewish conspiracy theories.
Vedrana Rudan was born and lives in Opatia, Croatia. In the early nineties, she lost her job as a radio journalist for satirizing the president of Croatia, and she currently writes for Nacional, Croatia’s biggest and best-selling daily newspaper. Her recently released novel, Night, comprises the shockingly angry and honest rant of a woman spending the night watching TV, while planning to leave her husband for another man. Night is Rudan’s first work to be translated into English.
A key theme for Rudan has been to accuse the “Jews” of crimes in Gaza, and to engage in moral equivalences between the mass murder of Jews in the Holocaust and the Palestinian casualties in the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. A couple of years ago she was fired from Croatian TV station TV NOVA for stating that she cannot understand why “the smoke over Auschwitz is eternal, and the smoke over Gaza is c*nt smoke” (C*nt smoke is a Serbo-Croatian slang expression for something that is completely irrelevant or unimportant).
Vedrana Rudan is the manifestation of a widespread sickness in Croatian society, and that is Anti-Semitism, says Ivo Goldstein, the president of Bet Israel. He could not hide his disappointment that such comments were shown on national television. He considers that Vedrana Rudan is an unserious person that tried to deal with serious things in a totally wrong way, adding that it is useless to defend yourself from such statements.
Rudan keept mentioning in her column the small Palestinian boy that died in an Israeli attack. She is referring to the Muhammad al-Durrah incident that took place in the Gaza Strip on September 30, 2000. Jamal al-Durrah and his 12-year-old son, Muhammad, were filmed by Talal Abu Rahma, a Palestinian cameraman freelancing for France 2, showing the boy crying, a burst of gunfire and dust, after which the boy is seen slumped across his father's legs.
However, a French court ruled that the footage was a hoax. The judges found in a 13-page decision that the cameraman's statements were "not perfectly credible either in form or content."
In the end Goldstein added that Vedrana Rudan’s column is only one in a series of Anti-Semitic provocations that occurred in 2009. The most terrifying one occurring just before the marking of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“From one certain telephone number, which seems to be a phone booth in Split, came a threat that a bomb was planted here, and that everything will blow into the air in one hour, with swearing on the account of Jews. We immediately informed the police, who arrived and searched the whole building. Luckily, they did not find anything” said Goldstein.
Rudan has also stated that her favorite quote from Anne Frank’s Diary is “When will Jews stop being Jews and become humans?” Needless to say, she’s shamefully twisting Anne Frank’s words – the hunted Jewish girl was wondering when Jews would no longer be vilified and demonized by others, exactly what Rudan does at every opportunity.
Rudan claims that she was fired not for her incendiary statements, but because of Jewish control of the media, especially since some of the owners of TV NOVA were Jews. The fact that they hired her in the first place, considering her reputation, and let her do a TV show where she routinely bashed Jews while doing her nails, does not hinder her claims in the least.
To this day, Rudan uses every possible opportunity to repeat her quips about Auschwitz and Anna Frank, which she is proud of claiming as “the best sentences she has ever written”. Interview by interview, she always steers to the same subject.
It is worrying that Vedrana is very popular among the young people in Croatia, and her views are influential. Although it may seem strange that anti-Semitism would be a popular subject in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, who have almost no Jewish population at all, the unfortunate reality seems to be that is that there is always someone spreading anti-Semitism, and always others ready to listen.
Jews first arrived in Croatia in the first centuries of the Common Era, when Roman law allowed free movement throughout the Roman Empire. Archaeological excavations in Osijek show a synagogue dating from the 3rd century AD and the archaeological excavation in Solin (Salona, Roman capital of Dalmatia) shows Jewish graves from the 3rd century.
At the outbreak of World War II, 23,000 Jews lived in Croatia but the community was almost entirely destroyed in the Holocaust when Axis forces, led by Nazi Germans, invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941. Under the Germans, Croatian ultra-nationalists, the Croatian Ustaše movement came to power. Croatian fascists established a state called the Independent State of Croatia. The Ustaše were notoriously anti-Semitic, and wasted little time in instituting anti-Jewish legislation and persecuting the Jews under their control. Indeed, the then NDH Croatian Interior Minister Andrija Artuković, a member of the Ustaše, said "The Government of NDH Croatia shall solve the Jewish question in the same way as the German Government did". The Ustaše set up concentration camps at Kerestinec, Jadovno, Metajna and Slana.
Only 5,000 Croatian Jews survived the war, most as either soldiers in Croat Tito's National Liberation Army (Yugoslav Partisans) or as exiles in the Italian-occupied zone. After Italy capitulated to the Axis Powers, the surviving Jews lived in free Partisan territory.
After 1945, atheism was the official policy of Yugoslavia and Croatia: there was no rabbi in Croatia until the mid-1990s. After the founding of the State of Israel about a half of the survivors renounced their Yugoslav and Croatian citizenship as a prerequisite for leaving the country and acquiring the Israeli citizenship. Those who opted for Israel signed a document by which they left all property, land, and other unmovable property to Yugoslavia.
The 2001 Croatian census listed only 495 Jews, with 323 in Zagreb. It is now estimated that some 2,500 live in Croatia though the number could be larger because the post-war Jewish community of Croatia is highly assimilated, with 80% of Zagreb's 1,500 Jews either born into mixed marriages, or married to a non-Jew. The Jewish community in Croatia is organized into ten Jewish "municipalities" (Croatian: Židovska općina) in the cities of Čakovec, Daruvar, Dubrovnik, Koprivnica, Osijek, Rijeka, Slavonski Brod, Split, Virovitica, Zagreb. Since 2005, Zagreb also has a separate Jewish organization named "Bet Israel", formed by a splinter group in the original organization led by Ivo Goldstein and others. A minor Chabad organization is also registered in Zagreb.
The Jewish community in Croatia became concerned about the government's nationalist course after Croatia became independent in 1991. The government began a gradual rehabilitation of the war-time Nazi puppet regime, the Independent State of Croatia, its leadership and, to some degree, the pro-fascist Ustasa movement, although this process has no specifically anti-Jewish component.
Franjo Tuđman, the first President of Modern Croatia in 1990, led this move to give a positive image to the war time Ustasa movement. His political party, the HDZ, won the first post-communist multi-party elections. A year later in 1991, he proclaimed Croatian independence and was re-elected twice, remaining in power until his death in 1999.
In Croatia, fascination with the legacy of the fascist Ustasha continues, and a small industry supplies memorabilia -- including calendars with portraits and sayings of Ustasha leaders -- linked to the times when the Croats, killed large numbers of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Serbs and communists.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center asked Croatian authorities in Feb. of 2007 to stop the production and distribution of sugar packets featuring Hitler’s image and printed anti-Semitic jokes (see picture above). In July of 2008, the Simon Wiesenthal Center called the funeral of Dinko Sakic’s an “outrageous display of unrepentant racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia.”
Sakic died at age 87 on July 20 while serving 20 years in prison for war crimes he committed as head of the notorious Jasenovac extermination camp, the worst of about 40 camps run by the then Nazi puppet regime of Croatia. Sakic was buried wearing the uniform of the Ustasha, the local pro-Nazi movement, according to the Croatian daily Vecernji with a priest calling Sakic a “model for all Croatians” (see picture of funeral above).
The death of President Franjo Tudjman in 1999 heralded a new era, with presidential elections, the victory of the democratic opposition and the gradual, if not complete, demise of Tudjman’s political camp.
In a phone conversation in January of 2010 with Rabbi Yitzchok Schochet of London who was calling on behalf of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE), Croatia's President-elect Ivo Josipovic acknowledged the need to fight anti-Semitism (see picture below of President Ivo Josipovic with Ivo Goldstein, the president of Bet Israel).
The RCE represents over 700 rabbis and Jewish communities throughout the European continent. The organization works to improve religious services and facilities, such as providing financial and professional assistance for the construction of mikvaot (ritual baths), offering guidelines and advice, and other issues of importance to the Jewish communities.
Rabbi Schochet stressed to the president-elect that the RCE “looks forward to continuing the cordial relationship with the Croatian Government.” The RCE has regularly met in the past with the prime minister and President of Croatia to discuss matters such as the preservation of cemeteries and Anti Semitism. “We are looking to you to continue the good work in this regard and other matters of mutual concern,” Rabbi Schochet said.
Although Croatia has clamped down on the rise of Neo-Nazism, there are still attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions within the nation. Josipovic acknowledged the need to fight anti-Semitism in Croatia and thanked Rabbi Schochet and the RCE for his call. He also expressed his willingness to continue the cooperation with the RCE and the local rabbis.
A new openness toward the West and a change in the nationalist tone will be tested by whether historical revisionism can be ended and the creeping rehabilitation of the Ustasha’s murderous legacy stopped.
