Signposting Jewish heritage sites is an important way to “put them back on the map” and educate local people and visitors alike. The Tachov Archives and Museum Society — TAMUS, a Czech non-profit NGO deeply involved in documenting and preserving Jewish sites, in March installed information panels for visitors at six Jewish cemeteries: Nove Sedliste, Pořejov, Chodova Plana, Bezdružice, Střibro, and Hartmanice.
The information panels, installed with the support of the Prague Jewish community and Federation of Jewish communities as well as local municipalities, have a similar design and use text and photographs to tell the story of the local Jewish community. Some include a map of the Jewish cemetery.
Similar panels are planned for installation in four more cemeteries this year.
All the panels have been installed in small cemeteries in fairly remote towns or villages well off the tourist track.
The Jewish cemetery of Pořejov, in fact, is, along with a ruined church, among the very few traces that remain of the village, which was heavily damaged by advancing American troops at the end of WW2 in April 1945 and eventually demolished in the 1950s (after the remaining ethnic German population was expelled).
Hartmanice, however — in the foothills of forested mountains about 150 km southwest of Prague near the border with Germany — is also the site of a small museum located in the former synagogue and dedicated to local Jewish-Czech-German pre-war coexistence. The cemetery, about a kilometer outside the village, was devastated with almost no physical traces remaining (though there is a commemorative monument). Adding the information panel there thus publicly reclaims the history and expands the scope of the village as a Jewish heritage site.
TAMUS carries out an extensive program of documentation, maintenance and preservation.
Click here to see its latest annual report describing its activities in 2018
One of the projects listed for 2019 is a revamp of the exhibition on the history of Jews in the Šumava Mountains, part of the Simon Adler Museum in Dobrá Voda, not far from Hartmanice.
The museum, which opened in 1997, is dedicated to Adler, a Jewish historian and rabbi who was born there and who was killed at Auschwitz in 1944.
The museum exhibition to date focuses on Adler, his life, and his family history as well as on local Jewish history and traditions.
See more pictures on the TAMUS Facebook page