Survival in Sarajevo: How a Jewish Community Came to the Aid of Its City

Edward Serotta, a Jewish-American Berlin-based photographer, has devoted his artistic career to the exploration of the contemporary relationship between Europe and the Jews who remain there. In the early 1990s, Serotta traveled to besieged Bosnia three times, resulting in a published photographic essay about the remaining Jews of Sarajevo.

Edward Serotta is a writer, photographer and television-news correspondent specializing in contemporary Jewish issues in Central Europe. Born in Savannah, Georgia, he graduated with a degree in Advertising from the University of Tennessee and worked in various fields in Los Angeles and Atlanta from 1972 until 1984, when he began photographing in and writing about Central Europe. He relocated to Budapest in 1988 and has resided in Berlin since 1991, where he is the director of the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation, a foundation that specializes in chronicling contemporary Jewish issues in Central Europe and the Balkans. His first book, Out of the Shadows: A Photographic Portrait of Jewish Life in Central Europe since the Holocaust, was published by Birch Lane Press in 1991. The accompanying exhibition premiered at the International Center of Photography in New York, and traveled to 24 public venues in 8 countries. Out of the Shadows was translated into German and published in 1992 by Nicolai Verlag. Survival in Sarajevo: Jews, Bosnia and the Lessons of the Past, was published in 1994 by Editions Brandstaetter of Vienna and Distributed Art Publishers, New York. Five exhibitions from the project are touring 41 venues in 11 countries. The third project in this trilogy of post-Holocaust Central Europe is Jews, Germany, Memory: A Contemporary Portrait, published by Nicolai / Distributed Art Publishers in November 1996. The accompanying photographic exhibition will open in Berlin's Centrum Judaicum Museum in November before touring Europe and North America. As a freelance photographer, Edward Serotta has published photo-essays in TIME, the Guardian Magazine, Sueddeutsche Zeitung Magazine and Die Zeit. Mr. Serotta has written on Germany and Bosnia for the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Independent, Die Woche and Die Zeit. He is an occasional ABC-Nightline correspondent and in 1996 he produced mini-documentaries on the Sarajevo Hagaddah, the Theresienstadt ghetto, and is currently working on a special report on the secrets of Bohemian beer.