In the Issues pages of our In Focus section, we publish a lengthy article by the Czech researcher Martin Smok about the destroyed (and now all but forgotten) Jewish community in Prague’s Vinohrady district and in particular its destroyed synagogue — designed by the noted architect Wilhelm Stiassny, it was inaugurated in 1896 and was the largest and most ornate synagogue in Prague, boasting two tall towers and an immense arch over the portal.
Stiassny was one of the most important synagogue architects in central Europe. Among synagogues of his that survive are Prague’s lavishly ornate Jubilee synagogue and the little Moorish-style synagogue in Malacky, Slovakia.
Smok’s article — which includes fascinating unpublished photographs — tells the story of the Jewish community through the history of the synagogue, which was hit by an Allied bomb toward the end of World War II and was demolished in 1951.
I’m trying to save the memory of a forgotten Jewish community in Prague. It’s a community whose synagogue was the largest and most magnificent in the city, but a community that is almost totally unknown by the millions today who visit the Czech capital.
“What do you mean, an unknown Jewish Community in Prague?” people always ask me. “We know everything about the Jewish Community of Prague,” they say. “We have threaded through the Old Jewish Cemetery and seen the tomb of Rabbi Löw, the Maharal, the creator of Golem; we have visited the Jewish Museum; we have drunk coffee in the Franz Kafka coffeehouse – and some of use have even prayed in the Old-New Synagogue. How could anything be unknown about such a tourist hotspot?”
Nonetheless, the very existence of the largest Jewish Community of interwar Czechoslovakia, in Královské Vinohrady (or Königliche Weinberge in German), a residential district an easy walk from downtown Prague, remains virtually unknown. Try finding it in your Prague guidebook.
Smok is working on a research project on the Vinohrady Jewish community, sponsored by the Prague 2 city district in cooperation with the Jewish Museum in Prague and has been seeking out the last witnesses, photographs and artifacts that could help “reconstruct the lives of a proud and prosperous Jewish population that also lived on the borderline between national, linguistic and religious identities.”
We are happy to publish his appeal to anyone whose family archives hold material that could help. Please contact Smok at smok.martin@gmail.com, or join the Vinohrady research project Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/454118427972251/.