"The Jews had memory"

2026 Study Tour of Croatia & Bosnia and Herzegovina

This July, travelers joined YIVO’s study tour of the Balkans, visiting Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina over 13 days. The tour was led by renowned historian and YIVO’s Visiting Research Historian Dr. Samuel Kassow and noted author and photographer Edward Serotta. Through expert lectures, personal testimonials, and visits to sites of remembrance and cultural renewal, this tour helped to illuminate the lesser-known story of this region’s Jewish communities.

The brochure warned that border crossings might be slow. It failed to add that, on a YIVO trip, no border is simply crossed. It is dated, contested, and supplied with three earlier names. What moved me most was the strange scale of things. A small manuscript in Sarajevo holds a civilization’s wanderings. A narrow tunnel holds a city’s determination to remain alive. A grave in Stolac becomes a place of pilgrimage. In Split, a synagogue survives within the walls of an emperor’s palace. The emperor had marble; the Jews had memory. We may draw our own conclusions about which proved more durable.

—  BENJAMIN BALINT, Vienna-based author of books on Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz