The president of the Jewish Cultural Center and long-term special representative and head of the Economic Representation of the Republic of Srpska in Israel, Arie Livne, died in Jerusalem at the age of 99, it was confirmed to SRNA at the Jewish Cultural Center in Banja Luka.
Arie Livne was an advisor to the President of the Republic of Srpska, a senator of the Republic of Srpska, as a special representative of the World Jewish Congress.
He was born in Budapest in 1921. He spent his childhood in Novi Sad, from where his parents moved him to Budapest in 1941.
In 1942, the Hungarian fascists mobilized him in a mine near Bor, in eastern Serbia, where Jews from Romania, Czechoslovakia, and the subcarpathian parts of Russia were forced to work.
Towards the end of the war, after learning that the Hungarians and Germans were retreating, Livne moved to territory controlled by partisan forces where he joined them.
In late 1944, his parents were transferred to Auschwitz where his mother was killed and his father survived by becoming a scribe thanks to his knowledge of the German language.
Part of the family from Koprivnica was killed in the Ustasha camp Jasenovac, and the other part in Budapest, so that Arie Livne remained the only surviving member of the once large Livno family.
For a period, thanks to the support of friends from the former camp in Bor, he ran a film company in Belgrade as the director of the film department, and in 1956 he went to Israel, where he founded the Israeli film archive named after the famous director Steven Spielberg.
He was the director of the information department in the government of Israel, and then the deputy and general director of the Jewish Agency.
He is the winner of a special letter of thanks from the Government of the Republic of Serbia for merits in deepening and strengthening friendly relations between the Serbian and Jewish people, the Order of the Republic of Srpska of the first degree for merits and assistance to the Serbian people.
Arie Livne will be buried today in Jerusalem.
TST
