The Return of Saint Sava to Jerusalem

For nearly eight hundred years, Saint Sava waited for the moment when he would return to Jerusalem. Since he walked its alleyways in the 13th century, prayed at its holy sites, and strengthened the Serbian people’s bond to the Holy City, his figure has remained rooted in Jerusalem’s memory. Though he did not return in body, his spirit never ceased to hover above the ancient stones. Six years ago, that spirit received a tangible and surprising expression.

The decision to name the center after Sava and Yehuda Alkalai was no coincidence. Sava, founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church and the father of his country’s educational and legal systems, saw Jerusalem as a source of spiritual inspiration. Rabbi Alkalai, born in the Balkans and one of the forerunners of Zionism, carried in his heart a different call; for a national Jewish return to the city. A physical return of a people who had gone into exile. Both of them, each in his own language and faith, looked with longing at the same city.

Since then, the return has taken place through words. In Jerusalem, Serbian is studied; in Belgrade, Hebrew is studied. Israeli students are introduced to Serbian poetry and the complexity of the Balkans, while their Serbian counterparts encounter Hebrew not only as the language of the Bible, but as a living language of law, and become acquainted with the complexity of the Middle East. Together, they research the Holocaust in the Balkans. Study days have been dedicated to the fate of Serbian Jewry during the Nazi occupation, to the memory of the communities that were destroyed, and to the ways of commemoration and education. Scholars from both countries sit around the same virtual table and ask how to tell this painful story without surrendering its complexity. The shared, bloodstained background of the two peoples in the Second World War and in recent decades assists in this effort, and the distance between the two cities is minimized through computer screens, Zoom, and shared libraries.

There is something symbolic in the fact that Jerusalem and Belgrade choose to deepen their connection through academia; both capital cities saturated with identity and tension, with many scars from difficult wars both in recent decades and ancient history. Where politics may harden positions, knowledge softens them. Where memory may divide, study creates a common language.

An exceptional event was celebrated at the center in Jerusalem this week. For the first time in the city, Serbia’s Statehood Day, known as Sretenje, was marked through an independent initiative of Israeli students. The term Sretenje signifies “encounter,” and in Jerusalem it received an additional historical meaning: the date marks the arrival of Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem, an event that Saint Sava also sought to renew. The local initiative to mark the day, without budget or direction from above, attests to the friendship that has been woven between the young people and the two cultures and cities.

And so, after centuries, the “return” of Saint Sava to Jerusalem does not echo in the ringing of bells in distant church towers, but in the rustling of pages and student laughter on a lively campus in the heart of Talpiot. It is heard in a language lesson, in a lecture on comparative law, in a discussion on the heritage of Balkan Jewry, and also in the celebration of Serbian Independence Day as yet another reason for a youth party.

This is a living bridge between past and future, between faith and scholarship, between two cities that history bound together with an unbreakable thread. And now academia is turning that thread into a thick rope of partnership. A rope at whose end, this week, the flag of Serbia was hung.