TIRANA, Aug. 3 – Israel opened in Tirana its embassy last week, 21 years after establishing diplomatic relations with Albania.
Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, attended the opening in Tirana considering the event “especially festive” and mentioning also the fact the new embassy is opened in a predominantly Muslim country. He cited the fact that Albania had a 70 percent Muslim population and NATO membership status.
The two countries established diplomatic relations in 1991.
“The new embassy means that Israel will be able to play a bigger role in the revival of the Jewish communities of the Balkans and play a bigger role in interfaith dialogue,” said Yoel Kaplan, chief rabbi of Albania.
Albanian Prime Minister Sali Berisha gave Kaplan, who is a Chabad emissary in Thessaloniki, Greece, the title of Albania’s chief rabbi in 2010. Albania has a Jewish community of about 200 people.
Berisha considered the opening of the embassy as a “testimony of the excellent, long relations of a special moral that joins our two nations.”
During the Holocaust, Albania was under Italian and later German occupation. The country’s Jews were not murdered by the Nazis in part due to their fellow non-Jewish countrymen. Hundreds of Jews from neighboring countries fled to Albania, making it one of the few nations in Europe where the Jewish minority grew during the Holocaust.
Reflecting on dramatic changes around the world, including progress and rapprochement between the two countries,Avigdor told those in attendance, “It could not occur to me, during my studies as a student in the Soviet Union, that the day would come and I would stand in the capital of Albania as foreign minister of Israel and dedicate the Israeli embassy here.”
Albanian Foreign Minister Edmond Panariti considered bilateral ties between the two countries as excellent and also urged the Israeli business to come and invest in the tiny western Balkan country.
The Tirana facility is the tenth Israeli diplomatic mission around the world to be opened since Lieberman became foreign minister and three more are scheduled to open in the upcoming year.
Israel opens embassy in Albania

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