A long, thoughtful “from our own correspondent” piece on the BBC by Chris Bowlby about the role and relevance of Jewish cemeteries and other built heritage in teaching about the past to educate for the future. He focuses on the Jewish cemetery in Brno, and on the city’s Villa Tugendhat, a moderning gem built for a Jewish couple; the stories they tell and the way these stories are now being told for the public.
At the Jewish cemetery, its buildings also impressively restored, was a tall young attendant, eager to please, gesturing towards tables loaded with publications and information. He told me about a new business – tours organised by his community highlighting their history. It was such a cheering contrast to other Jewish cemeteries I’ve seen in the region, where exhausted older community members struggle to keep going, or where, as in Vienna, decades of shameful neglect by the city left the resting place of many of its greatest residents full of collapsing or vandalised tombstones and weed-infested plots.
But in Brno the newest generations from Jewish and other communities are trying again to make the mingling of peoples in this European crossroads a creative force. In the city centre, Ukrainian and Russian students are among those honing their business or language skills in classrooms together. They know better than anyone that the threat of conflict is never completely buried. It resounds in this city’s memory – not only of Nazis and communists, but in cathedral bells, ringing out a reminder every day of the brutal 17th Century siege by protestant Swedes, or the major Napoleonic battlefield at Austerlitz nearby. Yet I will be remembering, in a beautiful cemetery, not only awful history but also the spirit of a community that still believes it can honour the past by creating a successful future.
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We have posted in the past about the Brno cemetery and the Jewish Tourism Information center set up there. The Center operates as part of the Jewish Brno Project, a collaborative initiative of the Jewish community in Brno and the city’s Tourist Information Center that could serve as a role model of how Jewish heritage can be managed and promoted.
The Cemetery is located at Nezamyslova 27, in the Zidenice district of town, an easy tram ride from the city center. Trams 8 and 10 from the main railway station stop right in front.
The Visitors Center provides a range of services, including guided tours of Brno Jewish sites, tourist packages and itineraries outside the city. There are stacks of free informational material, including well-produced brochures in various languages on local and regional Jewish heritage. The Center has free WiFi internet access, and there is an English-speaking staffer.
For the cemetery itself, it provides individual free tours as well as free audio guides. A brochure guide to the cemetery includes a map locating the graves of prominent people interred there – the brochure provides brief biographies and photos of their gravestones. And there is also a computer screen with a link to the cemetery database, so that you can search for individual tombs.
Read more about the Brno Jewish cemetery and Information Center