The city of Prague is returning to the Prague Jewish community cobblestones cut from Jewish gravestones that the communist regime had used to pave a prominent downtown pedestrian promenade.
As we reported in January, the cobbles were used to construct the pedestrian promenade along Na Příkopě street, at one end of Wenceslas Square, in the 1980s. They are believed to have been cut from granite matzevot taken from a destroyed Jewish cemetery founded in 1864 in the village of Údlice, in northern Bohemia near the town of Chomutov.
On its web site this week, the Prague Jewish community said a memorandum had been signed with the city and the stones will be taken to one of the city’s Jewish cemeteries — 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 partially destroyed in the Communist era, when the city’s TV tower was built there.
The case of the Prague cobblestones became known after the fall of communism in 1989, but nothing was done to rectify the situation despite Jewish efforts to have the cobbles removed.
Radio Prague International reported that efforts to identify the stones from which the cobbles were cut would be carried out under a cemetery and gravestone documentation project called “Finding the Lost Faces of Jewish Cemeteries.”
Finding the Lost Faces was initiated last year, financed by the Czech Ministry of Culture and the Czech-German Fund for the Future. It is being carried out by the monuments preservation company Omnium zs.
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.
Leo Pavlat, the director of the Jewish Museum in Prague, wrote a piece about the Prague cobblestones case for Czech Radio in 2014.
Pavlat recalled how on his way to work at the Albatros childrens’ publishing house in the 1980s, during the work to build the Na Příkopě promenade, he had noticed the piles of cube-like cobblestones heaped up and ready to be laid, and he had recognized at the time that they had been cut from matzevot — the polished sides with the inscription were embedded facedown, leaving rough, bluish-colored granite on the surface; these cobbles were darker than other cobblestones and were used to form patterns in the walkway.
Pavlat pocketed two of the cobbles cut from matzevot, which he conserves to this day — one bears a Hebrew letter, and the other the date 1895.
Read (in Czech) a Czech News Agency story about the case