{"id":370,"date":"2013-10-04T12:33:21","date_gmt":"2013-10-04T19:33:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=370"},"modified":"2013-10-07T10:45:43","modified_gmt":"2013-10-07T17:45:43","slug":"prague-blog-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=370","title":{"rendered":"Prague Blog #5"},"content":{"rendered":"
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October 4, 2013<\/p>\n

The day began too early, with a silly phone call at 3am from Budapest from someone who thought I was in Los Angeles. \u00a0Should have put the phone on silent, I guess. \u00a0Afterwards, neither Nathan nor I could fall asleep. \u00a0Finally got back to sleep around 7:30am, but then had to wake up again so we could get to a meeting I set for 10am at the new Jewish cemetery.<\/p>\n

During the trip I wanted to try to make some headway in getting the Jewish Community to make the cemetery database available for genealogists. \u00a0The Vienna Jewish Community put its much larger database<\/a> online years ago. \u00a0So I got in touch with Zuzana Ber\u00e1nkov\u00e1, who administers the cemetery for the Jewish community. \u00a0We met in her office along with Rabbi Chaim Koci who represents the Jewish Community in these matters. \u00a0My cousin Helena Vankova showed up with her two year old son Adam and joined us, which was nice because Helena’s husband Daniel is a good friend of Rabbi Koci.<\/p>\n

Bottom line is that they want money, about\u00a015\u00a0500,- EUR in order to make the database of over 20,000 names public on their own website. \u00a0The data is ready, but they want to recoup some of the cost of compiling it and perhaps use it for further work on other cemeteries. \u00a0Nathan thinks it is ridiculous, but I suppose that’s how these things work. They have something that we want, and hope that they can get something for it. \u00a0Others might consider it a duty or even a mitzvah for the Jewish Community to help Jews with family members in the cemetery find their loved ones and remember them. \u00a0But even mitzvahs can cost money, I suppose. \u00a0So I will see if I can help raise the necessary funds.<\/p>\n

They should make the data available on the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry<\/a>, but they want to keep control. \u00a0It’s a mistake, because now only those who know to research in Prague will use it. \u00a0But Prague, like all major cities, was a magnet for Jews from the surrounding smaller towns, especially from Galicia. \u00a0While a Galizianer might search a surname at JewishGen and find a cousin in Prague they never knew existed, they aren’t likely to search a Prague database. So they will lose all those if they do it themselves and don’t share with JewishGen.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0810\"<\/a>Helena and Nathan and I walked through the cemetery. \u00a0I took photos of all the tombstones with names I recognized, about 20 percent of them. \u00a0All these very common Prague family names that do not exist anymore: Nachod, Best\u00e4ndig, Porges, Bondy, Schifferes, Moscheles, Taussig, Teweles, Klemperer, Wehle, Wantoch. You can see a list of about 200 of them on the genealogy website<\/a> I have been working on, that ties them all together in one big tree. \u00a0Helena showed us some of her family graves, which are in prominent locations in the cemetery, easy to find. They must have been relatively well off.<\/p>\n

Then we met my friend Julius M\u00fcller<\/a>, for my money the best genealogical researcher in Bohemia and Moravia. \u00a0First we went to lunch, and I had another typical goulasch with a somewhat canned kn\u00f6del. \u00a0(It was sliced, but you’re supposed to pick it apart with a fork.) \u00a0After lunch we went to the older cemetery in Zizkov. \u00a0This one was mostly destroyed in the 1980s when the Communists decided they needed a giant radio tower in the center of town. \u00a0Julius said the tower was really used to block reception of Radio Free Europe. \u00a0Didn’t work, I guess, since the Communists fell in 1989 anyway. \u00a0The Jewish Community was apparently too weak or complicit to stop the demolition of 5\/6 of the cemetery.<\/p>\n

I noticed again that it seemed that only the oldest tombstones, all in Hebrew, survived. \u00a0The cemetery lasted from 1780-1890 and therefore most of the tombstones should be in German. \u00a0Jews in Bohemia and Moravia predominantly spoke German after 1780. \u00a0Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. \u00a0After Czechoslovakia declared independence in 1918, the Jewish community split into three camps. \u00a0Citizens were forced to declare their nationality. Some Jews, the Zionists, declared themselves Jewish. \u00a0Others, who had assimilated German culture, picked German. \u00a0And Czech nationalists picked Czech. \u00a0After 1918, it became increasingly advantageous to be Czech and so all the younger people became Czech, the children spoke Czech in school, etc. \u00a0After the Nazis murdered two thirds of the Jews and most of the others escaped, the Czechs then expelled anyone (even surviving Jews) who had declared themselves German. \u00a0So the only ones left were the Czech nationalist Jews. \u00a0Mostly they suppressed the fact that their families had spoken German in the 19th century. \u00a0You hear so many family stories of Bohemian Jews who claim that their grandmother spoke only Czech. \u00a0Certainly it was true for some, but only a tiny minority. \"IMG_0765\"<\/a>You can tell because in most villages the tombstones after the early 1800s are all in German until about 1900, and mostly German through 1918. \u00a0I’ll be able to confirm this again when I go to Ckyne tomorrow, but it is certainly true for the new Jewish cemetery in Prague. \u00a0Only the newer tombstones, done after 1918, are in Czech. \u00a0Here’s a good example of one. \u00a0Franz Klauber died in 1936 and his epitaph (Mein Bestes – Mein Edelstes – Mein Alles! \/ My Best – My Truest – My Everything!) is in German. \u00a0Underneath is the name of his mother, who perished in Treblinka in 1942, listed with a Czech female ending as Amalie Klauberov\u00e1. \u00a0I bet she never called herself that.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0830\"<\/a>I suspect very strongly that part of the motivation for erasing the Zizkov cemetery in the 1980s was to erase this large remaining sign of the German-speaking Jewish history in Prague. \u00a0No doubt the Jewish Community also found it embarrassing to have this reminder of their very recent conversion to Czech. \u00a0Bulldozing it was in everyone’s best interest, except for those like me who live abroad and descend from the people who were buried there. Unfortunately, I was too young to know or do anything about it. \u00a0Would be different today, I hope.<\/p>\n

\"Julius<\/a>

Julius M\u00fcller<\/p><\/div>\n

Julius took us toward his office in a nice part of the city, near the river. \u00a0I always learn things from Julius, who told me there are “missing” Jewish registers held by the Jewish Musuem of Prague for about 20 Moravian towns. \u00a0We need to get them scanned. \u00a0He also gave me scans of the index for the mostly destroyed Zizkov cemetery. \u00a0I always wonder what happened to all the gravestones and how come there were no pictures. \u00a0Julius said he heard that the Jewish gravestones were sold to the CIty and used for cobblestones. \u00a0Martin Smok tells me the stones were destroyed already in the 1960’s and in the 1980’s it was only the graves that were removed. \u00a0In any case, they are lost to us.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0835\"<\/a>Nathan and I rested a bit and then went by subway and bus to Michaela’s apartment for dinner with her and Hana. \u00a0The apartment building was just as I remembered it, still with the sandbox out front. \u00a0Michaela even still had the old 1991 Let’s Go Europe that I had left with her after my first visit. \u00a0At that time she had not yet explored outside of Czechoslovakia. By now she is a world traveller, fulfilling her lifelong dream to see the great sights of the world that were for so long cut off to her. \u00a0Michaela showed me some old family photographs. \u00a0She has better ones of my my great-grandparents than I do! \u00a0And a very cute one of my grandmother’s older brother and sister.\u00a0I took photos of the photos, so now I have them in some form at least.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0853\"

Maria and Rudolf Kolisch<\/p><\/div>\n

Tomorrow we head down early in the morning to Ckyne for the rededication ceremony. \u00a0I am curious what it will be like. \u00a0Ckyne is a very small town, and the cemetery is not overly spectacular like many others in Bohemia. \u00a0But there are apparently no better examples in the south of Bohemia. \u00a0it should be a fun conclusion to our week here.<\/p>\n

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October 4, 2013 The day began too early, with a silly phone call at 3am from Budapest from someone who thought I was in Los Angeles. \u00a0Should have put the phone on silent, I guess. \u00a0Afterwards, neither Nathan nor I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":406,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions\/406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}