A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  One evening, a police car made its way up the street through the crowd. Policeman were in both the front and back seats. Demonstrators jeered as the car forced its way through the crowd. Suddenly, it stopped and all four doors opened. Kraus braced himself—this was going to be bad. The four policemen started hurling something at the crowd. It was newspapers. It was illegally printed underground newspapers. That was the moment when Kraus realized that Communist Czechoslovakia, which was all he had ever known, was about to come to an end.

  HAVEL CALLED IT the Velvet Revolution. If a writer leads a revolution, it gets a good name. However soft and nonviolent it was, it wasn't really as smooth as velvet. Lives changed very quickly and kept changing for years. There was Karol Wassermann's favorite playwright as president of the country, and his fellow dissident writers in legislative and diplomatic positions. For that matter, Was-sermann himself, the temperamental pharmacist in an ascot, an outsider who showed up for Sabbath at the Old-New Synagogue and never belonged to anything, was elected president of the Federation of Jewish Communities. Tomas Kraus became the director. The former official Community leadership was removed immediately. Their collaboration with the regime would not be forgiven. Some had cooperated with the secret police monitoring activities from the station across the street from the Jewish town hall. Some had cooperated in the persecution of their own Jewish Community members.

  Throughout the country there was a move to purge collaborators. Twenty new legislators were accused of having worked with the state security and were told that if they did not resign, they would be exposed. Ten refused, and they were not only exposed but their hearings were televised live. In the morning the public was convinced of their guilt. By the afternoon the accused had persuaded the public that they were innocent victims of the state security. The next day, it again appeared that they were guilty. The case was never settled, and most of the legislators kept their seats.

  In post-Communist Central Europe, rifling through once-top-secret police files and exposing moles, snitches, collaborators, and secret agents became a public passion. Society had a psychological need for the sensation of a purge. But the state records were a bottomless maelstrom, because the system had tried to control people by compromising them. To get the right school, the right job, a good car, you had had to give something. In most cases, all the state wanted was to get your name in a file. All most people really wanted was to live their lives and contribute as little as possible to the state security apparatus. Martin Mandl wanted nothing more than to pursue his career as a scientist and live a modestly comfortable life in Brno with his wife and their two children. He said, “The worst thing about the Communist regime was that every few months you had to make a very hard moral decision on the degree of collaboration you would permit yourself, to get the things you needed for your life and your family.”

  The hunt for collaborators cost Czechoslovakia its only remaining rabbi. At a time when there had been no rabbi left in Czechoslovakia, Daniel Mayer had studied for six years at the rabbinical seminary in Budapest. He not only gave the Community a rabbi where there would have been none in the country, but he also helped keep Judaism alive by gathering around him the small group of people willing to practice. After the revolution his stubborn work was remembered, and he was asked to run for parliament in the 1990 elections. As with all candidates, his police files were searched, and it was found that before Mayer had been allowed to go to Budapest, he had had to sign a paper agreeing to cooperate with the secret police. According to the records, if he received any information detrimental to the state, he agreed to report it. There was no evidence that he ever did pass on information. The regime did not really care. The important thing was they had him in their files. He was theirs. He was compromised and therefore part of the system. He could be trusted because they had this on him. After the regime was overthrown, the Jewish Commu-nily in its antiregime zeal used the information exactly the way the regime would have—to discredit the community's leader. Mayer was told he could no longer be their rabbi. Mayer could have argued, as did Ilona Seifert in Budapest, that his compromise had made some measure of Jewish life possible. But Mayer did not argue. To the disappointment of some in the community who very much liked him, he left Czechoslovakia.

  Karol Sidon said, “Daniel Mayer was chosen by the regime to do their work. And he was used by the regime. I can understand it. It is difficult to condemn someone when you are not in their situation.” Sidon, who had been studying Jewish law for six years in Germany, always thought that this moment would come when Czechoslovakia would need a new rabbi. Now he went to Israel for an official conversion and to finish off his studies. He returned to Prague as rabbi in the fall of 1992, and with Viktor Feuerlicht/s help, he began establishing a kosher system and other institutions of traditional Judaism. They even planned a mikveh, though few Czech Jews had ever seen one. Hebrew classes were offered, and 150 students came the first year. By the second year, enrollment had doubled.

  Sidon no longer had time for writing, and in any event, being a writer in this new capitalist world seemed unappealing. “The greatest artistic freedom this country ever knew was from 1968 to 1970,” said the screenwriter-turned-rabbi. “Now, after the revolution, what is important is money. The great influence is money.”

  The Krauses, on the other hand, had become what had been considered before the war a typical Czech Jewish family, like the families of Tomas's parents Alice and Frantisek. The children had religious training, and the parents were involved in the Community. But they were not religious. Tomas described it as “a typical Prague Jewish atmosphere, where we celebrate both Christmas and Hanukkah.” He said he would like to attend Sabbath services, “but come the weekend, we have to get out of Prague. The kids need to breathe some fresh air.”

  Prague became the hot travel destination in the post-Communist world —in fact, it became the new place to go in Europe. While prices soared far beyond the grasp of Czechs, the city was a bargain for Germans, French, and Americans. The old stone architecture, with ornaments on everything from lampposts to drainpipes, was still stunning. The lantern-lit cobblestone streets, where shadows from the dark archways and the echo of footsteps once gave an air of mystery, were now the terrain of youths on noiseless sports shoes, hunched over maps, their backpacks casting enormous deformed shadows.

  Since “Jewish” had been out under Communism, now it was in. Everybody loved Jewish things. A popular non-Jewish rock group was called Shalom. Sometimes they wore yarmulkes, and their emblem was a star of David. Czechoslovakian youths often sported a star of David, and it was hard to say if they were Jews or simply Shalom fans, but there were more Shalom fans than Jews in Czechoslovakia.

  Bus tours to Theresienstadt, “an easy day trip from Prague,” became popular. Viera Krulis, who was in Theresienstadt from December 1941 until Liberation, got on one of those buses. When the bus arrived, she stepped off, saw the gates to the old fortress city, and fainted. She was put back on the bus and taken home. Before the war, her marriage to a prominent non-Jewish banker might have saved her, except that the banker had realized that his career would not go well under the Germans if he was married to a Jew. He divorced her, and she was deported along with her parents and sister. The rest of the family was sent to Auschwitz and killed, but Viera, on the strength of a childhood first-aid course, spent the next four years trying to deal with epidemics of typhoid, encephalitis, and scarlet fever—the diseases that overtook the crowded camp. After being liberated, she returned to Prague and took her son — now her only living relative—back from her former husband. She never spoke to her husband again. Her son grew up to also marry a non-Jew, and their children have no Jewish identity. Viera went back to Theresienstadt on a second bus tour, and this time, she proudly announced, she made it through the tour, blending in with the rest of the tourists.

  Prague's Old-New Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in Europe, became a star attraction listed in all the guidebooks. At first, the old gua
rd minyan was so unprepared for the onslaught of tourists that there were not even extra yarmulkes. Male visitors would walk through the ancient synagogue bareheaded, camera in hand. The S5'wagogue was open all week for tourists but closed to nonworshipers early Friday evening and Saturday morning so that a service could be held. The Saturday morning scene began not unlike it had seven hundred years ago, when this synagogue was new—with one small difference. In those days the men would mill around the high-ceilinged, stone-walled synagogue. Some would study Hebrew, others would pace and fidget with their prayer shawls. When the sun cleared the horizon, it would hit the amber glass in a small, bullet-shaped window concealed in the eastern wall, and a single ray of gold-tinted light would penetrate to the reading area in the middle of the synagogue, and the morning prayers would begin.

  This window was a forgotten detail. Six-story turn-of-the-century art nouveau buildings now blocked the sun from entering that window until it was well over the horizon. But the men still paced around waiting—not for a ray of light, but for tourists. Stocky Viktor Feuerlicht, meticulous Karol Wassermann, and about five other aging stalwarts patiently waited for the Israeli, American, or Dutch Jewish tourists so that the cantor could begin.

  Some of the tourists who filled out their ranks showed little interest in following the service. Others were genuinely religious. The women in this medieval synagogue are kept truly out of sight behind a thick stone wall. They can catch glimpses of the bimah through narrow windows that seem more like tunnels because they are several feet deep. When the time came to read the Torah, Pavel Erdos, who was younger and stronger, helped lift the heavy antique scroll. No one could recall Erdos having been Jewish until the tourists arrived. He made a profitable business booking tour arrangements for Israelis, although he understood no Hebrew, which may have been one of the reasons he looked so bored during the services. But with Feuerlicht's bad arm and Wassermann's heart condition, it was good to have him to help with the Torah. He always came late but on time for his part.

  By the end of the Saturday morning service, the nonworship-ping tourists would begin to arrive in a trickle, then more and more, armed with cameras, pushing their way in to see one of Prague's must-do attractions, while the aging locals struggled to explain in five languages that the synagogue was closed on the Sabbath. In 1993 the synagogue had to undergo major repairs, because the added vibration and humidity of the daily crowds was deteriorating the sandstone. The cemetery had twelve thousand ancient Hebrew-lettered tombstones, dating back to at least 1439, lined up to mark the layers of graves beneath the surface and had little room on its tiny plot for the thousands of tourists or for the few practicing Jews who still placed stones on graves, in the tradition of a desert people. Pathways were built in the cemetery in the hope of reducing the damage from the onslaught.

  Among the Jews of the Community, the taboo words were sometimes whispered: “It makes me ill to see German tourists walking on Jewish graves.”

  “I know,” Feuerlicht responded when the son of a Theresien-stadt survivor said this. “But tourism brings in money. It helps us.” The only other synagogue, the elaborately decorated, dusty Moorish-style Jubilee, with its tiled arches and turn-of-the-century grandeur, did not get the tourists. Its congregation still prayed in an austere room off of the balcony, with plaster patches on the walls and a bare heating pipe protruding. In the late 1890s, when Jews were moving out of the ghetto and into more fashionable Prague neighborhoods, the Jubilee had been built in what seemed an excellent location. How could they have known that one day this synagogue would have difficulty finding minyans because it was just a few blocks off the tourist beat?

  Tomas Kraus, as the new Community director, had inherited a painful problem in the form of the state-owned Jewish Museum, which included the cemetery, the Maisel Synagogue, and the rich collection of antique Judaica that Heydrich had stolen from deported Jews. The new Czechoslovakian state agreed to turn over to the Community the handsome sums now earned in tourist entry fees at each site. The government wanted to privatize and was selling off state industries to private small-scale investors. It would have been happy to turn over all Jewish property to the Community. And the Community would have liked to take it all over. It wanted to do things differently—broaden the displays and change the presentations to give more of an appreciation of living Judaism. As it was, it almost resembled Heydrich's dream, an exhibit of an extinct people, their unused ritual objects on display in the unused Maisel Synagogue. Kraus described the display of artifacts under the graceful, vaulted ceiling of the Maisel as, “breathing death on a shelf.” It was difficult to look at the neat rows of silver To rah pointers and not think about booty stolen from deported Jews—an empty synagogue full of the relics of annihilated Jews.

  The struggling Community with one thousand members could not afford to run all this, however. It had other priorities, such as the newly privatized Jewish hospital and a home for the elderly, which opened in the fall of 1993. But before the Community had even taken possession of all these treasures, it was bombarded with advice from Americans and Israelis. One Israeli group wanted to arrange to have the entire collection moved to Israel. The Community was furious. It had struggled to keep the collection together in this country, in spite of the willingness of the Communists to sell it off, a piece at a time, when there was a good offer. Like the old Communist regime, these Israelis had argued that Jewish things belonged in Israel, not in Czechoslovakia. Wassermann delivered so many angry tirades about American and Israeli Jewish organizations that in 1992 the board voted him out of the presidency. The Federation of Jewish Communities simply could not have a president who shouted at visiting Jews. “Why are American Jews always trying to tell us how things should be done?” Wassermann would shout. “What are you doing here? Why don't you leave? This is where we live! And the Israelis are even worse! They think they can tell us everything!”

  Another infuriating experience, for those few who had managed to stay and at last had a chance to rebuild, was to be constantly told by foreign Jews that they should leave. The Israeli ambassador brought a group of Jewish students from Australia on a tour of Jewish Prague to meet Tomas Kraus. One of them asked, “Why don't you go to Israel?” Kraus had his standard answer prepared, but before he could say it, to his great satisfaction, the Israeli ambassador turned to the Australian and said, “Why don't you?”

  THE COMMUNITY'S RECOGNIZED EXPERT on its historical treasures was Bedrich Nosek, who had been chief curator of the Jewish Museum until 1991, when he was able to start teaching Hebrew and Jewish studies at the university. His two sons, Marek and Michel, grew up around the Jewish community. Although their family wasn't Jewish, except for Bednch's father's maternal grandmother, they did not eat pork and they read some of their father's books. Marek, who became a lawyer and worked with one of the big American corporate firms that came in with Western capitalism, wanted very much to marry a Jew. This would restart the Jewish line that had vanished in their family five generations before. He married Elena, an Odessa concert pianist who had come to Prague for a music festival in 1985, given up her career, and stayed. When Marek met her, she was teaching piano to Rabbi Mayer's wife. Elena and Marek married and had a daughter, Anna, whose Jewish education was placed in the hands of her grandfather, Professor Nosek.

  In Odessa, Elena's sister Louba, 23, separated from her young husband and came to Prague in 1992 with her four-year-old daughter. She had no skills with which to support herself and her baby, but through the Jewish Community she found work with Pavel Erdos, the Torah lifter from the Old-New Synagogue. The relationship was reminiscent of the old Soviet joke, “I pretend to work, and he pretends to pay me.” Louba's job was to act as interpreter for Erdos, translating into English for Israeli and other Jewish tourists since Erdos spoke only Czech and Russian. Louba, pressed into iridescent stretch pants, her hair frosted and fluffed, would gamely meet Israelis at the airport with the brutish Mr. Erdos and try to figure out what they were saying,
all the while hoping that Erdos, whose face showed more cunning than perception, did not notice that she actually didn't speak much English.

  Erdos paid her as little as possible for this service, and when tourists threatened not to pay him because he really had very little to offer them as a tour operator, he would claim that it was all because of Louba's bad translation and threaten to withhold her pay. Louba tried to earn additional money giving walking tours of the Jewish quarter based on the knowledge she had acquired from BedrTch Nosek. But it was a hard life, this new capitalism, as her parents had warned her back in Odessa. Still, Louba would point out to her parents the fresh anti-Semitic graffiti that was appearing in Odessa, in the newly independent Ukraine, including a sign that said, “Kill the Jews.” She was trying to convince them to leave, but they always replied that both of them had good pensions and would not have anything if they left.

  Nosek's other son, Michel, went to a kibbutz in 1990. Then he began attending a yeshiva. He moved to Jerusalem and had himself circumcised and converted. Although he retained his Czechoslova-kian citizenship, he stayed in Jerusalem, praying three times a day, keeping strictly kosher, living a traditional Jewish life. The Noseks, five generations later, had finally become Jewish again. But not that Jewish. Far from the shriek most assimilated Jewish parents would muffle at their sons’ new hat and beard, far from Robert Altmann's criticism when Daniel had been married in the Pletzl, when BedrTch Nosek was asked how he felt about his son turning Orthodox, he simply said, “I'm very happy. I hope he will know more than I do.”