September 7 will see the unveiling of a new memorial constructed of hundreds of rescued Jewish gravestone fragments that had been cut into cobblestones during the communist era and used to pave a major pedestrian plaza in downtown Prague.
The Return of the Stones monument, designed Lucie and Jaroslav Róna, is already under construction at the the Old Jewish cemetery in the Žižkov district. (Not the famous Old Jewish Cemetery in the former ghetto area.) The Žižkov cemetery was founded as a plague cemetery in the 17th century and used until 1890. It was largely destroyed in the communist era — in the 1980s the city’s TV tower was built there.
As described by the Prague Jewish Community, the new memorial will have a horizontal circular center made of 200 of the cobblestones showing remnants of Hebrew and Czech inscriptions. Low walls of unequal height, made from the cobbles, will branch out from this “like rays of the sun.”
The total cost of the memorial is estimated at 750,000 Czech crowns (around €30,300). The Jewish community on June 3 launched a crowdfunding campaign for 150,000 crowns (€6,000) — and within two days had received pledges for well over that amount.
As we wrote in January 2019, the cobbles were used to construct the pedestrian promenade along Na Příkopě street, at one end of Wenceslas Square, in the 1980s.
It is not know for sure where the gravestones used to make the cobbles came from, as none of the inscriptions is intact. But is believed that at least some came from Jewish cemeteries in northern Bohemia.
The fact that matzevot were used for the cobblestones became known after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. It did not spark much public outcry, however, despite several articles written about the situation, particularly in the past decade.
A memorandum signed between the city and the Jewish community mandated that the cobbles be removed and taken to the Zizkov cemetery.
The Jewish community said that thousands of cobblestones — amounting to a total weight of seven tons — had been removed and returned so far.
There are more than 300 Jewish cemeteries in the Czech Republic, testimony to the more than 150 Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia that were destroyed in the Holocaust. During WW2 and afterward, under the communist regime, threats to these cemeteries included theft of individual marble and other headstones for sale or reuse as well as larger-scale projects such as the Prague pedestrian promenade that used them as construction and paving.
Read our earlier posts about the cobblestones HERE and HERE