Godzilla in a Bosnian porcelain shop

The contrast between Vladimir Andrle and Amir Gross Kabiri couldn’t be starker.

Both are prominent Jews living in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), but the similarities end there. Most recently, Kabiri has been publicly harassing and denigrating Andrle to such an extent that Andrle found it necessary to report Kabiri’s threatening behavior to the BiH federal police.

Why does this matter? The answer to this question is rooted in BiH’s multinational makeup – 48.4 percent Bosniak, or Bosnian Muslim, 32.7 percent Serb, and 14.6 percent Croat – and in the fact that almost 29 years after the November 1995 Dayton Accords ended four years of brutal warfare among these three ethnicities, the political leaders of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb entity created by the Accords, vehemently oppose any genuine reconciliation with the country’s Bosniaks. While Andrle has dedicated himself to fostering positive relations between Bosniaks and Bosnia’s Jews, Kabiri has consistently sought to exacerbate tensions and seems to actively encourage mutual hostility between the two communities.

Andrle is a longtime leader of the Bosnian Jewish community. He heads La Benevolencija,  the community’s Humanitarian arm that provides support for not just Jews but for needy Bosnians of all faiths. He is also a prominent member of the WJC Jewish Diplomatic Corps, the flagship future leadership program of the World Jewish Congress.

Together with Ambassador Jacob Finci, the president of the Jewish Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Andrle has worked assiduously to forge good relations between Jews in BiH and the country’s Muslim population. He has also been an outspoken ally of Emir Suljagić, the formidable director of the Srebrenica Memorial Center, in engraining awareness of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide into the international community’s moral consciousness.

In a 2020 interview, Andrle remembered going to the Sarajevo synagogue as a child while the city was under siege by Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces.

“During the war in 1992,” he said, “I was seven years old. I came here regularly with my parents and went to Sunday school here. When I think back about the war, I remember that I always felt safe here.”

Kabiri, meanwhile, is an Israeli entrepreneur with no apparent connection to BiH or the Balkans prior to 2020 when the conglomerate owned by his family acquired a bankrupt aluminum operation in the BiH city of Mostar. Since 2022, he has been the head of Mostar’s tiny Jewish community reputedly consisting of maybe 30 members.

Kabiri’s roots are in Iraq, Ukraine, and Yemen, and by his own admission he is a college dropout who previously spent time living in Paris, Poland, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Russia. One of his first initiatives upon being placed in charge of the family business was to diversify away from commodity trading and buying commercial property, especially in Poland.

According to Kabiri, Poland, which has one of the worst records in Europe with respect to restitution of property to Jewish Holocaust victims and their heirs, “was lucrative because it was an emerging market. We invested in abandoned factories in the industrial city of Lodz, which had once had a major Jewish population. Many of the factories had been owned by Jews before the Holocaust but were taken over by the Nazis and then by the Soviets and the Polish state. We took over the sites and modernized them.”

What a guy.

But acquiring property once owned by — and never returned to — Jews was only the first of Kabiri’s profitable commercial undertakings. One of the advantages of operating the Aluminji factory in Mostar was its proximity to the European Union – “only a 20-minute drive” from Croatia – “which meant that we could sell directly to the higher-paying market of the EU without huge shipping costs and logistics.”

No one has ever accused him of being stupid. Boorish, arrogant, obnoxious . . . but not stupid.

Kabiri appears to view Jewish-Bosnian relations primarily through the prism of his commercial operations in Mostar, whose inhabitants are predominantly Bosnian-Herzegovinian Croats. His concept of “giving back to the community” was to invest in and becoming vice president of Mostar’s HŠK Zrinjski football club whose fans were known to express ultranationalist Croatian political sentiments harking back to the fascist and antisemitic era of the Ustaše-led World War II Independent State of Croatia. This may well have endeared him to the employees of his factory and their families and neighbors but hardly contributed to an easing of tensions with the Bosniak Muslim population. His approach has resulted in him becoming identified, rightly or wrongly, with nationalist Bosnian Croat political elements whose interests are often antagonistic to those of the Bosniak establishment in Sarajevo.

Many Bosniak political figures have supported and are supporting the Palestinian side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is nothing new, but far too often, in the aftermath of the savage pogrom perpetrated by Hamas terrorists against Israeli Jews on October 7, one-sided support for the Palestinians morphed into blatantly pro-Hamas declarations.

Finci and Andrle expressed their criticisms of such antisemitism-tinged manifestations by way of responsible dialogue.

Kabiri, on the other hand, is lumbering through the BiH political landscape with all the sensitivity and subtlety of a Godzilla or King Kong on steroids in the proverbial porcelain and chinaware shop shattering everything in its way. He does not appear to have the interests of the BiH Jewish community as a whole at heart. Neither does he seem to be willing to engage with anyone in Sarajevo who does not agree with him a priori. His goal is confrontation for the sake of confrontation.

Last November, Benjamina Karić, the mayor of Sarajevo, felt threatened to such an extent after what she deemed months of daily harassment by Kabiri that she filed a criminal complaint against him. According to Karić at the time, Kabiri “shares and sends videos and photos of brutal murders and abuse to me personally [through social media] with messages that I perceived as a threat to the safety of not only me personally, but also my family, telling me in them that ‘history will judge me very soon’, and that my views ‘will not be forgiven’, etc.”

Kabiri’s verbal attacks on and psychological persecution of Andrle are in the same vein.

There is no way to know whether the experiment that is Bosnia and Herzegovina will succeed in the long run. Christian Schmidt, the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina who is responsible for the implementation of the Dayton Accords recently said that the country’s “multiethnic population has a right to find its way by nondiscrimination and mutual respect.” But for Schmidt’s aspiration to become reality, Andrle and other individuals on all sides who dedicate themselves to bringing people together must become the norm. And outliers such as Kabiri who want to tear BiH apart must be unequivocally exposed, isolated, and repudiated.

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Menachem Z. Rosensaft is Adjunct Professor of Law at Cornell aw School. He is the author of the forthcoming Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).