I am in Prague because the many threads of Jewish history I’ve been unravelling in France these past six years have led me here. Prague was one of the oldest centers of Jewish culture in Central Europe. Jews first settled in Prague in 970 CE. They endured the antisemitism imposed by the Church, murder during the Crusades, life in a ghetto where the gates were locked at night and on festivals. During Easter of 1389, many clergy declared that Jews had desecrated the host. They encouraged mobs to pillage and murder. Nearly the entire Jewish population of Prague, 3000 souls, died.
Yet, by the 16th century, the ghetto was once again home to Jewish scholars, historians, mathematicians, philosophers, and rabbis, Rabbi Judah Lowe ben Bezalel who wrote a commentary on Rashi’s Torah commentary, Rabbi Judah Leib, the Elder, who claimed lineage from King David. Jews who had been expelled from Germany, Austria, and Spain arrived in Prague. The community prospered. Then, in 1744 Empress Maria Theresa claimed the Jews were disloyal and expelled all of Prague’s Jews. The economy suffered. Maria Theresa brought the Jews back. By the early 20th century, German Jews in Prague were writing literature acclaimed worldwide, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Franz Kafka.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, 92,000 Jews lived in Prague. Hitler erased the entire population and culture in five, years, an erasure the Soviets continued during their control of all of Eastern Europe in the post war era. In Prague, the regime closed synagogues, forbade worship, and embraced an atheistic state. They turned one synagogue into a museum as a monument to an extinct people. Now, in 2016 Jewish synagogues are a tourist attractions and sacred objects, a mezuzah, a kiddish cup are souvenirs.
I walk a narrow path in the Old Jewish Cemetery where the dead are stacked nine layers deep. Prague is winter cold. There is no sun. I pause. Vida, my tour guide, waits ahead. She taps the toe of her boot. I stare at the jumble of ancient tombstones before me, all tilting like a house of cards. For three hundred and fifty years, Jews have buried their dead here; yet, this is not the first Jewish cemetery in Prague. The oldest is said to be located below the Prague Castle, another beyond the walls of Old Town where burials took place until 1478. The cemetery that I walk in was constructed early in the fifteenth century.
These tombstones tell the stories of my people – a crown carved into stone marks the life of a scholar; grapes, a person who has led a rich and fruitful life; scissors for one who labored as a tailor; blessing hands for the Kohens, descendants of the temple priests; a pitcher or basin for the Levites who poured water for the temple priests to wash their hands. Jews, we wash our hands before the Passover Seder; we wash our hands before we enter a house to pay our respects to the family of the dead. There are animal carvings, a fish for Fishel, a name that has roots in Yiddish and Hebrew, a name in my husband’s family. A deer represents the name Hirsch which has both German and Hebrew roots. Hirsch is my patrilineal name. Vida continues to tap the toe of her boot. I mumble a quick sorry and follow her down stone steps. She is both Jewish and Czech, a woman in her mid-fifties. I covet her blue, red, and yellow tapestry coat. She wears tailored trousers. Bright red lipstick. She has fastened a muff around her neck to keep out the cold. Her gloves are soft leather. Her boots are sturdy leather and trim. I sense her confidence and independence. She is the age of my youngest son. How did her family survive the Nazis and the Soviets?
She tells me that during the Second World War, her father was transported to Terezin, then to two more camps. Terezin was the so-called model concentration camp eighty kilometers north of Prague. “So-called” because before a Red Cross visit – always planned ahead – the Germans sent the old and the sick to Auschwitz, a killing camp. New arrivals participated in soccer matches, a theater performance, an orchestra concert. They showed a propaganda film where Jews lay on their beds and read, sat in chairs and knit, worked in a metal shop. These Jews smiled and laughed. Probably because the Germans did not want to humanize their prisoners, they showed the film only on Red Cross visits. Then, the film disappeared, most likely hidden as German surrender was near. Then in the mid 1960’s the film surfaced, and when I visited Terezin, I sat on a wooden bench in a dark windowless room with cement walls and watched.
In school, when Vida was reading her text book and learning about Soviet liberation, she questioned her teacher. “There must be a mistake in my history book,” she said. “My father has told me he was liberated by the Americans.”
“Your father is wrong,’ her teacher said. “There was no liberation by the Americans. That is Imperialist propaganda.”
At home, that night, her father said he was mistaken. “They must have been Russians dressed up like Americans and chewing gum.”
When you live in an authoritarian state, you find ways to survive. You camouflage, divert, and subvert. You teach your daughter to understand that under the ridiculous image of Russians dressed like Americans and chewing gum lies the unspoken truth. Only Americans chewed gum.
Repressive regimes leave their mark. They throw up barriers to self-expression, sever trust and fill people with doubt. In a strange way, they never leave. Mama, my maternal grandmother spent the first thirteen years of her life living in a place she called Russ-Poland under the absolute authority of the Czar, before emigrating to the States. Most likely, she lived in the Pale of Settlement, a strip of land where the Czar permitted Jews to live. She refused to speak of that place. When I asked, she spit into the air and said, “Feh,” a Yiddish way of expressing disgust.
I am certain Mama, my grandmother, witnessed pogroms. She taught me to walk softly, to lower my head. “Sha still,” she would say. “Don’t call attention.”
When Vida was growing up, Jews did not identify as Jews. The Communist regime had stamped out all Jewish cultural and religious activity, and long ingrained anti-Semitism became state anti-Semitism. Vida was fourteen when she learned she was Jewish and her father told her it was time to tour the Jewish community. The word community is probably a glitch in translation. There was no Jewish community. There was a Jewish Quarter with Jewish Street signs, empty synagogues, and no Jews. She found a rabbi who taught the stories of the Hebrew bible in his apartment. She was sixteen. Her father was afraid for her. She went anyway. “There was something exciting about this, you know. This studying in secret. We had these meetings. We were rebelling,” Vida said.
When this rabbi emigrated to Israel in 1989 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, government officials found three hidden microphones in his apartment. For some reason or no reason, the rabbi and his young students were not considered enough of a threat to warrant more attention. Vida’s uncle was.
Her uncle, her father’s brother, had spent the war years serving as a doctor in Terezin. He returned to Prague, married raised a family, and shared a villa with Vida’s father, her mother, Vida, and her brother. After the failure of Prague Spring, a rebellion that began in January of 1968 and ended when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague the following August, her uncle took his family on a holiday in West Germany. From there, they escaped to Australia where relatives took them in. “This was not good for my family,” Vida says.
Our tour is over, but we are still talking, standing now on the street where we will part. She is telling me things she would not say on her tour. A rift in her family. Consequences. Her father lost his job. The family lost their home. Her father spent a year in prison and a labor camp. How long in each place, she doesn’t say. As she speaks, she seems to be back in a place before she wore leather boots and soft leather gloves. She says, softly, “You survived. You knew how to survive.”
Suddenly, she glances at her phone. She is late. She must leave. She crosses and walks down a narrow alley, her red, blue, and yellow tapestry coat the only touch of color in a gloomy day.
At the Spanish Synagogue, security is tight. I show my Passport. I remove my woolen hat. The security guard looks up at my face. Down at my passport. My face again. He motions. I slip my arms through the sleeves of my jacket. He points to my neck. I unwind my scarf. He demonstrates, and I stand arms out from my sides. Tension tightens my jaw, contracts my leg muscles. He frisks me with a wand, then waves me toward a single open door.
The synagogue is stunningly beautiful, rich with gilt, vibrant with color, and decorated in motifs derived from the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. I visited this synagogue on my tour with Vida days prior. Completed in 1868, it is built on the site of a 12th century synagogue. Unlike the other synagogues in Prague, this is Reform synagogue, originally constructed for the German Jewish population. Members included the Brandeis publishing family which produced American scholar, judge, and philanthropist, Louis Brandeis. In 1941, the Nazis turned the synagogue into a warehouse for confiscated Jewish property. Then, under Communist rule, the synagogue became part of the State-run Jewish Museum.
I take my seat in a front pew and loop my scarf around my neck. It is cold. No heat. And dark. Lighting is sparse and low. This is Vida’s synagogue, but she does not attend services. She is not religious. Her husband is not Jewish. In school, her two sons did not say they were Jewish. Vida had not wanted them to feel different.
It is Friday night, the beginning of Shabbat, the traditional time to attend a service. We are maybe fifteen people in this vast space. The rabbi enters from a side door. He wears a coat, a yarmulka. No tallit. There is no Torah service. There is no Torah. I think of the Torahs on display in the museum – artifacts of a lost culture. Bizarrely, this was Hitler’s goal, to build a museum to a people he had erased.
According to Vida, both Christians and Jews bear the scars of the Communist regimes. Christians display the trappings of Christmas, trees and gifts, but have little or no spirituality or faith. Czech Jews grow up with Christmas trees and Easter eggs and still have little access to their faith. When Czech Jews visit the Jewish Museum and see a Torah, they don’t know what it is, Vida said.
All of the service is sung in Hebrew, beginning with L’hat Dodi, the song that welcomes Shabbat. I recognize the Amidah, a standing prayer of praise, central to all Jewish services, a prayer traditionally chanted in Hebrew, and because I do not read, speak, or understand Hebrew, because I did not have a traditional Jewish education, what I know of the Amidah is its melody playing now inside my head as it has played for Jews for centuries.
After the service we gather for the traditional oneg shabbat which translates as after the sabbath. On a table, the traditional challah and a carafe of wine. The rabbi blesses each. We pass the challah and break off hunks. We sip wine from small plastic cups. We introduce ourselves, an American student studying Jewish history in Prague, a Williams Student who heard Madeline Albright speak the night before. We are all, as they say, from away.
My visit to Prague falls in early November of 2016, just after Trump’s election. In my journal I write these words:
So, to look beyond this election, beyond Brexit – no, not beyond, but under these votes to see the rise of extremism and to understand these are warnings, warnings we’ve seen before, a politics of anger worldwide in the 1930’s. Populace is not strategy; it has no logic; it wants an authoritarian figure, a parent to fix all that has gone wrong – and a domineering parent at that, a Kafkaesque parent who will leave his children crushed under his boot.
What next?
Next came four years of chaos and crushing blows, lies, deception, a pandemic, then a reprieve under Biden that I thought was a win – until the election of 2024, and once again, in 2025, I find myself thinking of Vida’s story and her life under a repressive regime.
In college, Vida studied theater arts and became a puppeteer. She developed a puppet show in which her students acted along with her puppets. She wanted to teach Jewish children their culture and their history, so her characters told the stories the rabbi had told her. The authorities approved her scripts because they didn’t know who these people were: Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Rachel, Leah. Moses, Miriam, Aaron, Ruth. I assume she taught her two sons these stories as well, but not the ritual that would mark them as Jews. The irony is that when her oldest son was in Germany studying to be a doctor, he met a French woman. Jewish. Very religious. That November when Vida and I had walked and talked, the couple was planning their orthodox wedding in the Spanish synagogue in Prague. “Probably, they will live in Paris,” Vida had said.
So, what are these threads of Jewish history, culture, and memory that pull through us, weave our personalities, and turn us into the essence of who we are? They are our call to look back and see what is hidden. They are our strength and our resilience. Perhaps, our future.
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