In July 2018, President Reuven Rivlin visited Serbia, where he joined Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic in renaming a street after the Zionist visionary Theodor Herzl, in the Belgrade neighborhood of Zemun. It was in Belgrade that Rabbi Judah Ben Shlomo Hai Alkalai educated Herzl’s grandfather and father, laying the intellectual foundation of the Jewish state.
Ninety years later, Serbia became the first country in the world to endorse the Balfour Declaration. In a letter to David Albala, the Serbian-Jewish war hero who fought valiantly for Serbia in the First and Second Balkan Wars and in World War I, Serbia’s ambassador to the United States backed the Balfour Declaration. This marked the first time that any government had referred to the country of “Israel.”
Full Story (Jerusalem Post)
