Jewish and Muslim leaders delivered a joint address on Saturday from the fallen city of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, France Presse and Agerpres reported.

Husein Kavazovic, religious leader of Bosnian Muslims, and Menachem Rosensaft, honorary general counsel of the World Jewish Congress, at the Srebrenica Memorial CenterPhoto: Armin Durgut/AP/Profimedia

At the Memorial Center for the Victims of Genocide in Srebrenica, the American lawyer Menachem Rosensaft, president of the World Federation of Bergen-Belsen Associations and Honorary General Counsel of the World Jewish Congress, and the religious leader of Bosnian Muslims Huseyn Kavazović signed the “Jewish-Muslim Initiative for Peace.”

“We unite in pain. Our tears turn into prayers, prayers of remembrance, but also prayers of hope,” Rosensaft said at a ceremony to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust during World War II and the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995. He added that this is the time and place for a joint commitment “to prevent the recurrence of the horrors we are witnessing here today.”

For his part, Mufti Kavazovych said that “we remember the six million innocent Jews killed and many millions of other victims of fascist and Nazi ideology. We do this where, half a century after the historic ‘never again’, humanity has once again failed the test of responsibility.”

In Srebrenica, Bosnian Serbs killed about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and teenagers in July 1995, a few months before the end of Bosnia’s intercommunal war (1992-1995). The international community regarded this crime as genocide.

During World War II, the Nazis killed more than six million European Jews, including about 12,000 in Bosnia, where almost the entire local Jewish community perished.

The signing of the peace initiative was attended by Munira Subašić, president of the Srebrenica Mothers’ Association, and Jakob Finci, president of the Jewish community in Bosnia. The document calls for “opening the way to reconciliation” and “actively building peace.”

On the same occasion, both signatories mourned the Israeli victims of the Hamas attack on Israel last October 7, as well as the Palestinian victims of Israeli retaliation in the Gaza Strip. Kavazowicz said that “resistance to the occupation cannot justify criminal actions, just as the call to fight terrorism cannot justify the killing of civilians and collective punishment.”