The
sixteenth-century process of confining Jews into ghettos was an expression
of a Christian Europe that was wracked by religious wars over the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation. Although the Church had religious and economic
motivations for the segregation, Jews gained a modicum of autonomy among
their kinsmen. They practiced their trades and followed their culture
and religion in a tight Jewish community milieu.
Though
many old ghettos disappeared as they succumbed to modern urban development,
some are fairly well preserved. In Polná, a way-station town
between Prague and Brno, there is a ghetto complex that has been relatively
undisturbed since its inception in 1681. Formerly separated from the
town by upper and lower gates, the 32 houses of the complex define 2
courts joined by a narrow passage. The upper court is a large, unpaved
open triangle sloping gently downhill past
a well, the hand pump of which still produces water, and a solitary
clump of trees to the seventeenth-century
synagogue. The lower court is a small rectangle.
A kehillah
lived in this complex for nearly three hundred years, leaving behind
not much more than the synagogue, a community building, and a wooded
cemetery outside the town. Without Jews since World War II, the ghetto
is now a proletarian neighborhood that still projects something of the
ethnic atmosphere of its former inhabitants. It has been proclaimed
a National Heritage Zone and local authorities have made considerable
progress on restoration of the synagogue.
With
their 50 families of more than 300 persons by 1714, the kehillah
needed a community building. An annual fee of 2 gulden and 20 kreuzer
secured a permit to build a Jewish town hall. By the century's end,
as the kehillah counted 87 families, 16 new houses completed
the larger upper triangle and formed a smaller court on the south below
the synagogue. The Jews were loyal patriots. When Emperor Ferdinand
V arrived in 1836 for a state visit to the district town of Jihlava,
a large deputation of Polná Jews went in grand procession to
welcome him. They carried aloft magnificently embroidered flags and
held Torah scrolls decked in holiday mantles.
The
kehillah reached its peak in the mid-nineteenth century, with
128 recognized families: a total of 770 persons. Large families of Jewish
poor crowded the ghetto houses, while some of the more affluent moved
out to the town. A descendent of Count Dietrichstein contributed 80
gulden toward the expansion and repair of the synagogue in 1861. The
original vaulted ceiling had cracked despite the 40-year-old iron reinforcements,
therefore its replacement was a flat ceiling on steel I-beams
under a slightly peaked, tiled roof that held aloft a gilded Star of
David. The interior was beautifully refurbished.
Sadly,
the kehillah enjoyed its renovated synagogue for only a very
short time. The worst fire in Polná history spread through the
town only two years later, destroying most of the houses; three thousand
people, including all the Jews, lost their homes. Gifts for the victims
poured in from many parts of Austria. Four Jews participated on the
distribution committee. Although the community succeeded in rescuing
the Torah scrolls, the parokhot, and much of the ceremonial silver,
the synagogue was a charred shell that had to be completely rebuilt.
The
last rabbi of Polná, Rabbi David Alt, emigrated in 1920 after
most of the ghetto houses had been sold to Christians and only 85 Jews
remained. One of the last resident Jews of that period, Esther Gutman,
who came to Israel in 1938, told us of her childhood:
"By
1930 we were only a few Jewish families in town and it was hard for
my grandfather, the hazzan, to gather a minyan for the
prayers. There was no one to be a shulklapper to summon Jews
to prayers, so he used to send my sister and me out to knock on doors
and urge people to come to the Sabbath evening services. For holidays,
it was his custom to invite the town poor and passing Jewish travelers
from Slovakia and Carpatho-Ruthenia to a festive dinner at our house,
so that there would be a minyan for prayers."
The
Nazis confiscated all Jewish property during World War II. They shipped
documents, books, and ritual Judaica to Prague, for the projected "museum
of decadent Jewish culture." Of the forty Jews deported from Polná,
only two children and two adults returned. There was no one to renew
community life. The abandoned synagogue served briefly as a church of
the Czech Brethren, then as a storeroom as it slowly fell into neglect
and ruin. The roofless synagogue and rabbi's house in Polná were
among the early parcels of former Jewish property restituted in the
early 1990s to the Jewish community in Prague, custodian of Czech Jewish
communities.
Facing
a narrow alley just off the large court, the north facade of the seventeenth-century
synagogue contains two stone portals, each with an indecipherable keystone
inscription. The left portal once led to a gallery that collapsed in
1969, leaving only a mound of bricks and broken plaster. The portal
on the right leads to a long anteroom and, by a left turn, to the main
hall. Two of the original four granite pillars still guard the entrance
to the sanctuary, where weeds flourish in the cracks of the broken stone
floor. A bare niche in the east wall marks the location of the Ark.
A charity box had been torn from the partition wall near one of the
pillars, and a plaque that blessed its donor, Yidl Filitz has since
been stolen. Built originally in Baroque style the synagogue underwent
restorations in 1863 which introduced neo-Gothic elements, the most
prominent of which are the tall, lancet arched windows.
After
half a century of neglect and misuse, the Polná synagogue is
undergoing a restoration funded by the municipality and the Prague kehillah.
The work, including research, continues in earnest with support from
the Ministry of Culture. The roof was restored in 1992 and scaffolding
filled the interior for a long time. A small Aron Kodesh that turned
up in the town museum storeroom in 1930 is now undergoing restoration;
it served in the small prayer room, but will eventually replace the
large missing Ark in the synagogue. When completed, the restored synagogue
will serve as a concert and exhibition hall, and it will house a museum
of the history of the Jews in the Vysociny region. One section will
display selected items from Polná's Judaica, now stored in Prague's
Jewish Museum.
Jan
Musil, a gentile octogenarian and lifelong ghetto resident, was employed
by the Communists in the 1950s to strip the synagogue of valuables.
When we visited, he reminisced with us and said, with a wry smile on
his ruddy cheeks, ". . . I heard about the Jewish treasure hidden
in the synagogue when I was taking down the brass candelabra there.
They said it was in the shape of a golden calf, buried somewhere inside.
We started a hectic search. We dug all over and knocked on all the walls,
but couldn't find it." Then he leaned out from the ground floor
window to huddle with Josef Fencl, our translator. Both of them laughed
and looked around the courtyard. Fencl explained, "People
watched all morning as you crisscrossed the ghetto and the synagogue
with your fancy camera equipment. They're convinced that you Jews know
exactly where to find the golden calf and that you have come here to
take it away."
|
Abridged
from: Rivka and Ben-Zion Dorfman, Synagogues Without Jews, pp.
167-172 (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society, 2000) |
Introduction
l Preface
l Interview
l Dubrovnik
l Rhodes