The Tachov Archives and Museum Society (TAMUS), a Czech non-profit NGO deeply involved in documenting and preserving Jewish cemeteries and other sites, has released its Annual Report showing the scope of its activities in 2019, ranging from on-site cemetery work to publications and lectures (including at the IAJGS conference in Cleveland).
TAMUS reports that it completed the photo documentation and cataloguing of eight Jewish cemeteries mostly located in small towns or villages.
It installed information panels at 10 out of the way cemeteries: Bezdružice, Chodová Planá, Hartmanice, Kolinec, Nové Sedliště, Podmokly u Sušice, Pořejov, Rabí, Stříbro, and Stráž.
As we reported in April 2019, the panels were installed with the support of the Prague Jewish community and Federation of Jewish communities as well as local municipalities. They 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.
Another TAMUS project was a revamp of the exhibition on the history of Jews in the Šumava Mountains, part of the Simon Adler Museum in Dobrá Voda, in western Bohemia near the border with Germany.
The museum, part of the regional Museum of Šumava Sušice, opened in 1997. It is dedicated to Adler, a Jewish historian and rabbi who was born there and who was killed at Auschwitz in 1944. The museum exhibition focuses on Adler, his life, and his family history as well as on local Jewish history and traditions in the region and commemorates dozens of small Jewish communities that once existed in the area.
TAMUS has scheduled documentation work in eight more Jewish cemeteries in 2020, but it is not clear yet what impact the Covid-19 crisis may have.
Click here to read the 2019 Annual Report
(TAMUS is 90 percent funded through private donations, and the report provides information on how to donate.)