Danon Dr Jakov - Jadovno 1941.

Well-known Banja Luka’s Jewish families out of the circles of the city of Banja Luka,
on which it will be talked about more in the chapter on Holocaust, are Poljokan (Levi),
Sarafić (Salom).
Aškenas community was founded in 1883 in Banja Luka, and was much richer and
better equipted. The building of synagogue was approached already in 1903 with rabbi
Pinekas Keler at the head, who, then, at the Aškenas community, organized the courses of
Hebrew. In 1925 he moved to Bohemia, where, in Trenčin, he was appointed to archrabbi.
Known Banja Luka’s Aškenas’ families rav Herzler, Bramer, Castl, Fisher, Brikner,
Herzog, Gottlieb, Schnitzer, Grunwald, Rozenraugh, who, by their professional orientation
contributed a lot to both economic and social, and cultural development of Banja Luka. Two
communities, two rabbis, and one cementery, in
the Banja Luka’s settlement of Borik, was
founded in the distant 1883, by the engagement of
the state official Bernard Nojbah, as the bond
which connected all.
The coming of Sephard’s Jewish families
to Banja Luka from Serbia was in the period of
bad laws in Serbia (1866) – in which the work of
the Jews was forbidden in the inside-, so that they
were forced to immigrate, across the river Drina,
to Bosnia or to carry out the names’s change by
adding the suffix "ić", if the surname of the
domestic origin was being alluded to. Thanking to
the activity of Alliance for the equality of Jews in Europe, on the Berlin Congress in 1878,
that kind of discrimination was abolished, but, for many Jewish families there was no return.
At the forming of the list of Jewish families, in essence, it should be differentiated
those who were born in home towns and represented a part of domicile population through the
historical periods, and then those who, by the development of the trade roads, came in the area
of Bosanska Krajina before the Austro-Hungary occupation, what, primarely, reffers to
Sephard Jews, and finally, after the occupation, on Aškenas’s, who, under the pressure of
growing discrimination of anti-Semitism in home countries and under the shriek of economic
reasons, were forced to leave hearths or to endure further humiliations, which, in practice,
meant a kind of assimilation, the name change, converting to Catholicism* for the sake of
change of the working of the destiny. So that Aškenas Jews, as the history showed, yet from
the reign of the Turks, came to Bosnia, because their living conditions in the Ottoman Empire
were much better and favorable than in the very Christian Europe‚ "full of love for a man",
because it speaks in favor of that the status of Jews in the neghboring Croatia, which, yet from
the reign of Marija Theresa executed a great religious discrimination toward the Jews, in
which, judging by all, there should be asked for the real roots of genocide, carried out by the
Independent State of Croatia, predetermined by Vatican and the Third Reich, to perform the
crime as a real proof of ther loyalty.
Therefore the main motive, which made Aškenas, in the most cases, to leave their
homes was anti-Semitism, and all other reasons were of secondary nature. The numeral
explosion of Aškenas, mainly educated ones, in that time, with deficit professions, greatly
contributed to the economic development of Bosanska Krajina. Out of Sephard’s families in
Banja Luka, which pactically became a part of domestic environment, at the first place, as it
was said earlier, were the families Poljokan-Levi, Salom-Sarafić, Papo and Altarac. In the
most cases, these families were a small part of the great Sephard’s families come from the
direction of Sarajevo to Banja Luka, and from Banja Luka, dealing with the trade businesses
they were gradually leaving to other towns of Bosanska Krajina (Bihać, Sanski Most, Jajce,
Derventa, B. Brod and Doboj) and settled in them and founded Jewish communities.
50
Jewish cemetery, B. Luka 1913