The Jewish Quarter

Only 1500 Czech Jews survived long enough to receive reparations from the Czech and German governments after the Velvet Revolution in 1989. Originally there had been 180,000 Jews living here before the country was chopped up and fed to Germany with the hope that this would be the last conquest not the first of many.

157,000 Jews were transported through Terezin, not all Czech, most died. Now the Czech Republic has fewer than 5000 Jewish people living here, mostly in Prague. It is a Catholic country with a church on every corner. It is a Catholic country with a history of hostility towards the Jews who have been a part of this nation since the 10th century. The oldest remaining synagogue in Europe is here in Prague, dating from the 13th century.

The Jewish Quarter is now the most fashionable section of Prague with all of the boutique shops and fancy restaurants located on its border. Once a ghetto, once the only place where Jews could live, under Joseph II finally the wealthier Jews were allowed to leave, and the area filled up with the very poorest: the Orthodox Jews and the poor Christians. The Quarter was destroyed because of fire and disease and rebuilt, and now, after the Nazis were defeated, after the Communists were defeated, the Quarter is fashionable and a tourist destination. There is the Jewish cemetery, and various synagogues, some still in use, others converted to museums.

Oddly the Czechs convinced the German occupiers to allow them to collect the artifacts from the over 150 Jewish communities around Czechoslovakia and horde them in Prague. The original intention of the Nazis was to store the artifacts for an exhibit they would soon launch to illustrate the annihilated species. Thankfully it didn't work and the remains, including old Torahs, silver plates and cups, sofars, and books, are now collected and maintained by the Jewish Museum.

It was the Pinkas Synagogue that touched me. The interiors are covered with the names of the 80,000 Czech Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Simple black lettering, family names not repeated. I found my last name. My husband found his, too. Our friends are not Jewish and they watched our eyes fill up with tears, as we realized that aunts and uncles, cousins we never knew, died this horrible death of exile, confinement, dehumanization, and starvation.

I wandered through the city afterwards wondering how a city's history is so intrinsically connected to its anti-Semitism, how a city's legacy has such a rich vein of shame driven through it. And then I looked up and saw this decoration on a building, only constructed at the beginning of the twentieth century, but obviously recently restored. If you can't see it clearly, it shows a Star of David, a Jewish man's face in profile with a hooked nose, a woman's profile. But next to the Star of David is a pile of money! I saw this and wondered how it must feel to live here, being Jewish, and wondering what remains alive of this history in the blood of my neighbors.