NOVI SAD -- Serbian Orthodox Christian and Jewish religious leaders, guests and more than 10,000 citizens gathered in Novi Sad to mark 70 years since a WW2 massacre.

Serb, Jewish and Roma civilians were rounded up for several days in January 1942 by the occupying fascist Hungarian forces, to be executed on the banks of the Danube, their bodies thrown under the ice of the frozen river.

The commemoration ceremony on Monday was attended by Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Irinej, Serbian Chief Rabbi Isak Asijel, and Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Center Director Efraim Zuroff, among others.

Patriarch Irinej told the gathering that his message to those who committed the horrible crime against innocent people simply because they were of different ethnicity or religion was that "as Christians we forgive, but must not forget".

The patriarch said a similar message was sent by one of his predecessors, Patriarch German, in Jasenovac - a WW2 death camp set up by Croat fascist authorities to imprison and murder Serbs, Jews and Roma.

The crimes that took place in the town of Novi Sad and in the southern Bačka region in northern Serbia "represent man's deepest fall, which qualifies him lower than blood-thirsty beasts", said Irinej, and called for "a new spirit of time to rule after such times of evil".

In his address, Efraim Zuroff focused on the acquittal last year in Hungary of now deceased Sandor Kepiro, who took part in the raid as a member of the Hungarian forces.

The ruling to set him free was politicized, said Zuroff, and added that justice and remembrance were "two acceptable ways to react to such horrible crimes".

"Judge Varga admitted that Kepiro was not innocent, but after rejecting all documentation and testimonies in an astonishing manner, he ruled that the prosecution failed to prove the guilt," he stated.

For this reason, Zuroff told those gathered, we are left with remembrance:

"That is why there is this joint attendance of a large number of people in a place where crimes were committed. A loud and clear message must be sent that no politicized verdict can change facts or the guilt of perpetrators."

The event on Monday was marred by a controversy, when Novi Sad Assembly President Aleksandar Jovanović accused the memorial's organizers, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and "its security",of physically preventing him, and other provincial officials and ambassadors from attending.

The SPC Eparchy of Bačka, however, rejected these accusations, saying that the assembly president and Novi Sad mayor and their entourage "tried to take part in the official program, outside of the protocol and without an invitation from the organizers".

According to official data available at this point, in the town of Novi Sad itself, 1,246 people were murdered in the space of three days. The Hungarian forces rounded up and killed people indiscriminately, 415 women and 165 children among them.

The raids were also carried out in the wider Šajkačka region. The Racija 1942 Memorial Society has data that shows at least 4,000 people were killed, while the final number remains the to be determined.

The organization quoted Hungarian military sources who stated during the war that the raids in the Bačka District resulted in at least 12,763 deaths.

b92.net