Jewish Memorial in Liberec
ISJM, December 1, 2008
The Prague Daily Monitor has reported that a memorial to Holocaust victims was installed in the Czech town of Liberec, 90 kms NNE of Prague, on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. The Renaissance-Revival style synagogue of Liberec, built in 1889 was set afire by the Nazis in 1938 and then demolished. Before the Holocaust 1600 Jews lived in Liberec. Only 37 survived.
The new memorial is located in the former ceremony hall of the Jewish cemetery, built in 1900 and used as a storage space until this restoration (which cost 7 million Czech crowns, about 250,000 euro). The cemetery, opened in 1865 and expanded in 1896, has also been restored in recent years. In addition to graves of local Jews, the cemetery also has graves of many World War I era refugees from Galicia, and a mass grave of 11 women prisoners from the labor camp in Bílý Kostel n. Nisou.
According to the Prague Daily Monitor, Czech Senate chairman Premysl Sobotka said such memorials must be built for people not to forget about the past and not to allow anything like this to repeat. For the restoration of the cemetery hall and the creation of the memorial, the municipality contributed 4.75 million crowns, the regional authority provided 2.5 million crowns. The remainder came from private donors and the Holocaust victims foundation.
For more information on Czech Jewish sites, the best comprehensive source remains Jiří Fiedler's Jewish Sights of Bohemia and Moravia (Prague: Sefer, 1991).
Simhat Torah Celebration at Restored Synagogue
ISJM, October 23, 2008
Ruth Ellen Gruber reports that Simhat Torah was celebrated on October 22nd in the recently restored neo-Romanesque synagogue of Hermanuv Mestec (Czech Republic), designed by architect Frantisek Schmoranz and built in 1870.
The event was a joint celebration by Prague's liberal Bejt Simcha congregation and the Progressive Temple Sinai congregation from Wellington, New Zealand. Temple Sinai has a Torah scroll that comes from Hermanuv Mestec, which it received through the Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust, of which I have written before.
Go to Simchat Torah in Hermanuv Mestec, CZ for more information and photos of the synagogue.
Click here for more photos
Stolpersteine Project Memorializes Shoah Victims in Prague
ISJM, October 12, 2008
(Click here for this story with photos at Sam’s blog)
The Stolpersteine project ("Stones of the Vanished" or "Stumbling Stones") which began in Germany, and has now spread to the Czech Republic where it is being organized by the Czech Union of Jewish Students. The first stones will be set in the Old Town, in the Jewish Quarter, but more stones will be put in Vinohrady where the majority of Prague's Jews lived before the Shoah.
The Stolpersteine project, originated in 1994 in Cologne by artist Gunter Demnig, embeds small stones resembling cobbles in the pavements near houses where Jews lived before their deportation out of Germany, or to their deaths.
The stones are actually concrete cubes about 10cm each ( Four inches), with a thin sheet of brass on top inscribed with: 'here lived – the name of a person, the date of birth, the date of transport, where that person was deported and the place and date of that person's murder'. Each stone costs about 95 euro, paid for by contributions. As of last year, 13,000 "stones" had been placed in 280 cities in Germany, Austria, Hungary and Holland. The largest numbers can be found in Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin.
The project is representative. It makes no attempt to identify and commemorate every deported Jew, homosexual or communist. If it did, some German neighborhoods would be entirely paved with brass.
See: "Holocaust victims remembered by new 'Stones of the Vanished' project".
Restitution: Jewish Museum of Prague to Return Art Collection
International Herald Tribune, September 24, 2008
The Associated Press has reported that the Jewish Museum of Prague is ready to return an art collection of 32 paintings that belonged to Emil Freund, a Jewish lawyer from Prague who died in the Lodz Ghetto in 1942 to Freund's relatives. The contested collection includes works by Signac, Derain and Utrillo. How the collection will be returned and when and where items can be sold remains unclear. Czech law requires that at least some of the most notable works remain in the Czech Republic. The claimants would like the right to sell works abroad.
Read the article in the International Herald Tribune here.
US & UK Synagogues Research Kladno (Czech Rep.) Torah Scrolls
By Samuel Gruber
ISJM, July 18, 2008
More than forty years after the establishment of the Czech Scrolls Memorial Trust in London, congregations holding these survivors of the Holocaust continue to learn about the scrolls and the history and fate of the communities that owned and used them. These investigations can lead to close ties between Jews and Czech (non-Jewish) communities.
Since they were "rescued" in the early 1960s, the Trust has successfully restored and distributed over 1500 Torah scrolls collected in Prague during the Nazi occupation. In recent months, two congregations in the US and the UK have collaborated with a Christian community in Kladno, Czech Republic, to learn more about the history of two scrolls which came from that town, and to commemorate the hundreds of Jews of Kladno who were murdered.
Congregation Beth El in Fairfield, Connecticut has one of the memorial scrolls. The Northwood and Pinner Liberal Synagogue (NPLS) in Northwood, Middlesex, UK has a portion of another scroll, as well as Torahs from Kolin and Trebon. Rabbi Andrew Goldstein (who is retiring this year as Rabbi of NPLS) initiated the NPLS connection with (then) Czechoslovak Jewry in 1974 and has led many visits by to the Czech and Slovak Republics (See, for example: http://www.bjbe.org/spirit/kolin.htm). He and his congregation have been active in efforts to restore Jewish sites in Kolin and elsewhere.
However, as described in a recent article by NPLS member Michel Heppner, the Kladno Scroll at NPLS never quite got its due, and connections with that town were not made by congregation.
But this year, Dr. Ellin Yassky (known perhaps to my readers for the beautiful Jewish art books she has edited for publisher Hugh Lauter Levin), a member of Congregation Beth El in Fairfild, Connecticut (USA), took the leadership role in researching her congregation's Kladno Scroll. Fairfield and Middlesex congregations are working together, and they have linked with the Hussite congregation in Kladno, which owns and uses the former synagogue as its church. The synagogue, erected in 1884 in a loose Neo-Renaissance style, still retains many of its original features. It survives because the Jewish community of Kladno transferred ownership of the building to the Hussite congregation in 1939, in order to save it.
[In all, forty Czech synagogues are now churches; mostly Hussite. For a list see: Survey of Historic Jewish Monuments in the Czech Republic by Samuel Gruber and Phyllis Myers (eds.), 39-40, (under "reports")]
Together the three congregations have pieced together something of the history of the scrolls – and more importantly have begun joint commemorative and education programs about the Kladno Jewish community, its history and its fate. A commemorative service was held at the Hussite Church (former synagogue) in Kladno last Christmas, when members of the Fairfield Congregation visited on their way to Israel. On June 6th, 2006, the Fairfield scroll was re-dedicated in a ceremony attended by Czech diplomats, American elected officials, the mayor and archivist of Kladno, and the secretary of the Kladno Hussite Church. The guest speaker was Ela Weissberger, a Terezin survivor and a Holocaust education advocate. The Fairfield County Children's Chorale sang songs by Czech composer and Holocaust survivor Franticek Domazlicky.
For further information, please contact Congregation Beth El, 1200 Fairfield Woods Road, Fairfield, CT. 203-374-5544, or Ellin Yassky, Director of the Kladno Torah Research and Restoration Project.
Also see Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust