For those in Prague — an exhibition on Jewish traces in the Prague 2 district (New Town) will be on display until June 1 on the ground floor of the New Town Hall, Karolovo namesti 1/23.
Organized by the District 2 municipality and the Jewish Museum in Prague, the exhibition was curated by Martin Smok, who has long been carrying out research on the complex Jewish history in District 2 and in Vinohrady (a former village, now a residential neighborhood divided among Districts 2, 3 and 10), where Prague’s largest synagogue once stood.
In 2011, Smok wrote in a lengthy article published by JHE in October 2012, that the city district of Prague 2 in cooperation with the Jewish Museum in Prague had decided to sponsor a research project examining the diverse Jewish past of historic Vinohrady.
This has entailed scouting the world for 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.
Smok’s article focused on the magnificent twin-towered synagogue, designed by Wilhelm Stiassny, which was seriously damaged in 1945 by an Allied incendiary bomb and then demolished in 1956.
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 knoweverything 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.
The exhibition in Prague includes the only known remnant of the destroyed synagogue building.
Read Martin Smok’s JHE article