Ognjen Kraus

Ognjen Kraus (born November 4, 1945 in Zagreb , Yugoslavia ) is a Croatian physician , President of the Zagreb Jewish Community and the Coordination of Jewish Communities in Croatia.

Family background

Ognjen Kraus' family comes from Daruvar on his grandfather's side . At the end of the 19th century she moved to Zagreb. Ognjens grandfather Josip Kraus was the founder of the Merkur Clinic in Zagreb. He died there in 1934.

During the NDH - regime fled Kraus's father in 1941 over Rijeka to Italy . In Italy he was sent to a labor camp. After the armistice of Cassibile he emigrated to Switzerland , where he studied law and later worked as Assessor .

Kraus' mother was Slovenian . Before the Second World War she began studying medicine in Zagreb and had to break it off due to the chaos of the war. Kraus' mother was politically left-wing and active in the Communist Active Youth of Yugoslavia . It was in Ljubljana captured and how spent her husband to Italy in various prisons, often they had to solitary confinement endured. In 1943 she emigrated to Switzerland, where Ognjen Kraus' parents met.

The marriage took place in 1944. Shortly afterwards, in September 1945, they returned to ex- Yugoslavia in their father's hometown, Zagreb. Ognjens Kraus' father worked in Zagreb as a representative of the district court , his mother as a doctor. Among other things, she was Minister of Health in the Socialist Republic of Croatia for some time in the 1970s .

Life

Ognjen Kraus has been married to Sanja Milković-Kraus since 1978 and has two sons. Kraus was first elected President of the Zagreb Jewish Community in 1993 and was re-elected in 1997, 2001 and 2005. He is in the fourth mandate of his presidency. He is also the President of the Coordination of Jewish Communities in Croatia.

Professionally, Kraus works as a doctor in the field of urology . He works as a department head in the urological department of the oldest Croatian clinic "Sestre Milosrdnice", which was founded in Zagreb in 1846. His wife works as a doctor at the Institute for "Medical Research and Labor" in Zagreb. His eldest son Saša (Sasha) lives in Toronto ( Canada ). As an engineer he worked and lived in Israel for seven years and was recognized for his professional activities by the former Israeli President Ezer Weizmann . The younger son Jaša is studying law . Ognjens Kraus' twin sister lives and works in Italy.

Web links

• Interview and short biography at the Nacional weekly magazine (Croatian)
• Interview with SHALOM magazine (German)