The 23rd Annual Conference for the Jasenovac Research Institute commenced on April 22nd, 2025, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Jasenovac concentration camp at the end of WWII. The Croatian Nazi collaborators, the Ustasha, committed a triple genocide of against Serbs, Jews, and Romani, during World War II and massacred thousands of anti-fascists in the camp.
Prof. Barry Lituchy, of Brooklyn College and Executive Director of the JRI opened the event with his co-directors, Pero Kovacevic, and Dr. Aleksander Stojavonic. Three guest speakers gave lectures on their decades-long research that brought light to the often-forgotten story of Jasenovic and fascist-occupied Yugoslavia that was part of the Holocaust. Dr. Bastasic gave a lecture on the genocide in Croatia focusing on the Gosep-Jadovno killing site, which served as the main death camp in occupied Yugoslavia prior to Jasenovac.
Viktor Bejatovic gave his presentation on the war crimes of the German Wehrmacht in Nazi occupied Serbia, focusing mainly on the mass slaughter of Serbian civilians during the occupation. Prof. Dr. Alexey Timofeev then gave the concluding talk on the enormous sacrifices made by the Red Army in the liberation of Yugoslavia, 1944-1945. All three of these presenters provided an enormous amount of important historical and political information about genocide and the struggle against fascism that largely has been buried and deliberately distorted for a long time.
Barry Lituchy explained the importance of April 22nd, the day the conference was held. On that day in 1945, in the Jasenovac Death Camp, 11,000 of the surviving male prisoners staged a breakout of the camp. The women all had been murdered by the Ustasha the day before them. Knowing what would happen to them, which would have been what happened to the women prisoners, these men were fully aware that they would have to sacrifice their lives in a heroic act. Most of them did not make it, but the goal was successful as at least 100 escaped to live and tell the story of what happened in these camps to the world.
In 1997, the JRI brought 28 of those survivors from the death camps. Their testimony, according to Barry, is what inspired the work to create the JRI. Today none of the survivors are alive. But we must never forget their story.
Jews everywhere must acknowledge the horrors of the Holocaust in its entirety, we must never forget the horrors that Jews faced but also the genocides against Serbs and Romas, and also the mass slaughters of anti-fascists (predominantly Communists) during WWII.
We commemorate the work of the Jasenovac Research Institute which is doing and has been doing what no other organization in the world has done these past 30 years.
A recorded video of the convention can be watched on YouTube or the JRI website. If you missed it, we highly recommend viewing this convention.