He also recalled the historic visit of Israeli President Isaac Herzog to Tirana, the first Israeli head of state to visit Albania, where he laid a wreath at the Holocaust Memorial.
Speaking on religious tolerance, Prime Minister Rama pointed out that in many Albanian families, it is not uncommon for individuals to follow different faiths, yet they unite to celebrate each other’s religious holidays.
It is, in truth, a normal Albanian story. The same is true of our four traditional religious communities, which celebrate each other’s important days, and of their leaders, who gather regularly, as they did to accompany President Herzog when he laid a wreath at our Holocaust memorial in Tirana, during his historic visit as the first-ever Israeli head of state to land in Albania.

It is a spirit forged across centuries of hardship, occupation and poverty.

It was this same spirit that brought Albanians of all faiths into the streets to welcome and greet Pope Francis when he visited our country and, with his gentle and saintly voice, corrected the label we often used. No, said the Holy Father, yours is not religious tolerance. It is a religious fraternity, because it rests not on patience, but on the quiet certainty that faith is not weakened by the presence of another faith; it is strengthened by it.

We proudly count seventy-three Albanians of all faiths recognised as Righteous Among the Nations, whose memory shines within the walls of human dignity at Yad Vashem.

And with the same pride, we will soon open our first museum dedicated to the protection and salvation of Jews in the city of Vlora, Albania’s largest medieval city, where in the sixteenth century, Jews fleeing persecution in the West made up more than half of its population.

Our young people, and the many guests who come from all over the world to visit our beautiful country, where the number of Israeli tourists last year grew far faster than from any other nation, will see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears how small Albania was always a safe refuge for Jews long before our era, and how ordinary Albanians made that very small place the only country on Europe’s map to emerge from the Second World War with more Jews than it had when it entered it.

No one else in Europe can claim such a historical clean sheet, with not a single Jew handed over to the Nazis. No one better than Albania can bear witness to a simple truth, that being Muslim and being antisemitic are not bound together by faith in God, but by its abhorrent betrayal.
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