The Czech town of Kolín has purchased the former rabbis’ house of its once-thriving Jewish community and what was described as the Jewish town hall, with the aim of restoring them as part of its complex of the 17th century Kolín synagogue and other historic Jewish sites.
The buildings are located at 124 and 125 Na Hradbách street close to the baroque synagogue in the heart of the former Jewish quarter. Number 124 was the home both before and after WW2 of the town’s last rabbi, Rabbi Richard Feder (1875-1970), as well as earlier rabbis.
Number 125 stands in a yard behind the rabbis’ house and is accessed through a passage through that building. It was described by the city as the former Jewish town hall. It is a Baroque house from the 18th century with a classicist gable, but in very neglected condition with semi-collapsed roof.
The rabbis’s house includes a unique barrel vaulted room on the ground floor containing three well preserved mikveh basins from the 1920s, fed by springs, as shown in this photo posted on Facebook by Mayor Michael Kašpar:
Feder served as rabbi in Kolin from 1917 until 1942. He was then deported to Terezin, but survived and returned to Kolin after the war, serving there again as rabbi until 1953, when he moved to Brno as Chief Rabbi of Moravia and Silesia and, later also Bohemia.
Both houses will need extensive renovation, Kašpar said in a Facebook post.
On its web site, the city said it would apply for funding from the Norway Grants program and others.
The houses are currently in dilapidated condition, the front house also after the insensitive reconstruction of commercial premises in the 1990s. The city plans to seek funding for the reconstruction of houses through Norwegian funds and further through Jewish partner cities {…]. If all goes well, Kolín will gain another historical and tourist attraction.
Kašpar told the news site Kolinsky Denik that there was little chance that the restoration would be able to take place in the coming year or two, but if the city had not bought the houses now, it probably would have missed the last chance to do so.
He said the purchase came after two years of negotiations with the private owners, a process that was complicated by multiple ownership of parts of the property.
The move to buy the buildings drew inspiration from the work of the Northwood & Pinner Liberal Synagogue (NPLS) in London, which has forged close ties with the town and has a long history of activism to preserve its Jewish memory.
As the congregation’s emeritus Rabbi Andrew Goldstein wrote in a JHE Have Your Say personal essay, NPLS has a Czech Memorial Torah Scroll from Kolín, one of the 1,564 torah scrolls from around Bohemia and Moravia that were taken from Prague and sent to the Westminster Synagogue in London.
Since the 1970s, he and other congregations members have made many trips to Kolín and worked with the city on Jewish heritage and commemoration issues.
“After 1992, these became regular events with NPLS groups visiting every two years or so and, in recent times, the community’s teenagers making an annual trip as part of their Kabbalat Torah course,” the Liberal Judaism web site wrote in an article about the purchase of the houses.
Rabbi Goldstein wrote, in his Have Your Say:
Over the years – over the decades by now — our interest has also inspired the citizens of Kolín to take on the challenge of keeping alive the memory of their lost Jewish community.
They have restored the synagogue and it is used as a concert hall. They have installed in it a permanent exhibition telling the history of its Jewish community. They mount regular temporary exhibitions, for example, on the life of Rabbi Feder; or on the “lost Children of Kolín” researched and produced by students at local schools. And [installed] over 50 Stolpersteine in the center of town, in front of houses from which Kolin’s Jews were deported.
The purchase of the two houses adds a further layer and will expand the Jewish heritage preservation area in the former Jewish quarter and also increase the potential for Jewish heritage tourism.
The town also has two well maintained Jewish cemeteries — the old cemetery dates from the early 15th century and contains many important graves, including that of the son of the famed 16th century Rabbi Judah ben Bezalel Löw, the legendary creator of the Golem.
Read the Kolinsky Denik article (in Czech)
Read the article about the purchase on the Liberal Judaism web site
Read Rabbi Andrew Goldstein’s Have Your Say essay
Read the mayor’s Facebook post and see pictures
Read article on the city’s web site, with photo gallery