The Jewish community of Prague carried out the detailed photographic documentation of nearly 2,000 gravestones in several Jewish cemeteries in 2021, according to a recent report posted on the Jewish community web site.
Funded as in past years by the Czech-German Fund for the Future, researchers photographed and carried out other documentation of 1,974 matzevot. (The work was also supported by the Jewish Community in Prague, the Jewish Museum in Prague, and the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic.)
They included those in the old Jewish cemetery in Nový Bydžov, the cemetery in Načeradec, and the Old Jewish Cemetery in Kolín — in use from the fifteenth century up until 1887 and the oldest Jewish cemetery in the Czech Republic after the famous Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague.
A main focus was also the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague’s Zizkov district, which was established in 1680 and became the main burial ground of Prague Jews in 1787, after the closure of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague’s old Jewish quarter. It functioned until 1890, when the New Jewish Cemetery was opened.
The Zizkov cemetery was largely destroyed in early 1960s and then in the 1980s when the Czech TV tower was built there. A large part of the cemetery was dug up, tombstones were knocked down and broken and the rest of the cemetery was filled in a turned into a park.
Though only around one-fifth of the original cemetery still exists, the matzevot cover a broad range of styles, from Baroque, Empire and Romantic to the common forms of the latter half of the 19th century. The preserved part of the cemetery is a protected historical monument.
The Prague Jewish community is responsible for around 180 Jewish cemeteries, and the documentation of matzevot is an ongoing process.
“The significance of the project lies in the documentation of unique Jewish tombstones, often in a state of disrepair at unique cultural and historical sites throughout the Czech Republic,” the report says.
This documentation also serves as a basis for planning repairs and restoration of tombstones and will be useful as a professional source of information in the search for buried persons not only for experts and researchers, but also for relatives of the dead not only from the Czech Republic but from around the world.
1 comment on “Czech Republic: Report on 2021 cemetery documentation by the Prague Jewish community”
How can the database/ Documentation of the old Jewish cemetery in Prague be accessed?