The Jewish heritage of the Slovak capital, Bratislava, has been fully integrated into the city’s tourist and cultural product, with a new brochure and official web pages that complement a series of linked web sites and other online resources prepared by the city’s Menorah Jewish Heritage Foundation.
The brochure, “Jewish Bratislava,” is downloadable as a pdf from the official Bratislava tourism web site and will also be distributed in printed form. (So far it is only available in English but Slovak, German, and Hebrew editions are in the works.)
There is also a dedicated Jewish section of the official Bratislava Tourism web site, which links to officially sponsored Jewish heritage tours of the city.
Both the brochure and the web site feature a map positioning Jewish heritage sites in the city — including the synagogue, Jewish cemeteries, Holocaust memorial, and two Jewish museums.
The web site has direct links to the web sites of the synagogue and Jewish Community Museum, the underground Chatam Sofer Memorial, the state-run Museum of Jewish Culture, and the Jewish cemeteries — the cemeteries have an online register of graves.
There is no smartphone app, but the brochure has a QR code that leads to online resources formatted for smartphone use.
This official city package also links to further, and more in-depth, web resources reached under the umbrella Jewish Bratislava web site produced by the Menorah Jewish Heritage Foundation.
Here users can find information on Jewish history in the city, a much more detailed map of Jewish heritage and specific monuments, contacts and information about today’s Jewish community, as well as the direct links to various sites and resources.
Among them are the fully digitized Pinkas HaKehilla of the Bratislava Jewish community from c. 1765-1792 and the Sitzbuch (book of seats) from 1863 of the now destroyed Zámocká Street Synagogue.