THE ALT-NEU SYNAGOGUE AND THE PINKAS SYNAGOGUE
The Alt-Neu Synagogue in the Jewish quarter of Prague gets its name from its history, reflecting its rebuilding on an old foundation. There was already a flourishing Jewish community by the tenth century C.E., with its own house of worship; and as the congregation grew, it became necessary to erect a new and larger temple on the same site. The result is a fine mediaeval building, dating from the late thirteenth century, in a transitional style linking the Romanesque to the Gothic. Its Old-New name, however, has a symbolic as well as a structural meaning, for the history of Judaism is one of constant renewal of an ancient commitment: in antiquity, the Jews had to survive the captivity in Egypt, and the second captivity in Babylon; during the Diaspora, they have maintained their identity and their faith despite persecution; and in our own time, they have emerged from the Holocaust to refound their home in Israel. It is their enduring triumph that the old and revered, in what they stand for, is for ever new and honoured.
Just around the corner from the Old-New Synagogue, is the Pinkas Synagogue, a Renaissance building that has survived undamaged and unaltered to this day, next door to the old Jewish cemetery. It is a monument to the survival of the Jewish fact in Prague, even though that survival has been a struggle waged against pogrom and genocide. Indeed, all the synagogues in the Jewish quarter bear witness to a stubborn resistance to the virus of anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism is as much a part of Czech history as it is of European history elsewhere. There was a ghetto in mediaeval times; and even when a more relaxed climate of religious tolerance set in during the late eighteenth century, there was still enough social prejudice in Prague to restrict Jews, for the most part, to living and working in a Jewish quarter. Greater social freedom was born after 1918, when Czechoslovakia emerged as a sovereign republic from the ruins of the Austrian Empire: under the enlightened presidency of Tomáš Masaryk, a sense of equality was fostered between the ethnic elements of the population (Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Hungarians, and Ruthenians) and between their various religious traditions (Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Jewish, and secular). It was enlightened, to be sure; but it proved not to be durable. The Sudeten Germans defected to Hitler’s Reich in 1938, under the Munich agreement, and parts of Slovakia had to be ceded to Hungary and Poland. Ruthenia was annexed by Stalin in 1945. And the rump of Slovakia seceded from Czechoslovakia in 1992, proclaiming itself an independent republic. So much for national and ethnic unity!
Religious unity was another story, with its own set of unfortunate divisions. All the Christian communities, Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox, were persecuted by the Communists in power from 1948 to 1989, but there was little of the mutual antagonism between them that had marred their record in earlier times, perhaps in part because they now had a common enemy. Persecuted they may have been; but at least they were not exterminated, like the Jews. During the second world war, when the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia were occupied by the Nazis and Slovakia was ruled by a puppet regime of Nazi sympathizers, the Jewish population of Czechoslovakia was rounded up and sent to various concentration camps, especially Auschwitz: a few escaped the round-up by fleeing abroad before the war broke out, and a tiny few survived the round-up in hiding; but the vast majority were herded onto the cattle-cars and sent to the camps. Almost none returned.
In a tragic sense, therefore, it is not possible to say that the Pinkas Synagogue remains unaltered. Where there was once a large and flourishing congregation, there is now almost none. A little residual activity is still there; but the place is more a museum than anything else. A museum and a memorial: on one of the interior walls, a fine calligrapher has inscribed all the names of the 77,297 Bohemian and Moravian Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The wall is at once an act of mourning and an irrefutable accusation.
