Hundreds of Jews of Czech origin will descend on the country’s second city from all over the diaspora to celebrate Shabbat on the site of the Great Synagogue of Brno for the first time since it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1939.
They will sit down for Shabbat dinner, surrounded by architectural fragments, including decorated stones and shards of stained-glass windows recovered in excavations of the shul, once one of Europe’s largest.
The synagogue, which was built in 1855 in the neo-Romanesque style, once attracted more than 1,000 congregants and its Austrian architects had to create three tiers of galleries to accommodate female worshippers.
Now the site is finally being memorialised after 75 years of promises and three restitution attempts denied under communist rule.
“The most striking finding of an archival investigation is how reluctant society was – even after the war – to address the destruction of the synagogue,” says historian Michal Dolezel, chair of South Moravia’s committee for cultural and heritage preservation, who retells the dramatic events of the day after the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia.
“On the night of 17-18 March, a group of Nazi Ordnung members arrived at the synagogue, first looted it and then set it on fire. Firefighters who were called to the scene were forbidden to extinguish the fire and only allowed to protect surrounding buildings.
“After the war, there was discussion about rebuilding the synagogue or at least commemorating it. However, this never happened, and the site has remained undeveloped to this day.”
He says archives also reveal details of how the remnants of the virtually extinguished Jewish community engaged in a long fight over its destruction. “The plot on which the synagogue stood was not confiscated from the Jewish community until 1942, three years after it had been burned down. Until then, the Jewish community was engaged in legal proceedings against the insurance company to obtain compensation for the damage. Two courts ruled in its favour, and only the third – the Supreme Court – ultimately rejected the claim. After the war, in 1945, the re-established Jewish community brought the case before the courts once again.
“Once again, two courts ruled in its favour, but the third and final ruling, in 1947, definitively rejected the claim. And although the city of Brno committed itself to installing a memorial plaque on the site of the synagogue, that promise was never fulfilled.”
The site of the shul was expropriated by the state in 1963 but it is now privately owned. While rebuilding the shul remains out of the question, acknowledging its existence with a memorial and renaming its address to the original Synagogue Street marks a big victory for a community rebuilt by the handful of Jews who returned to a city where just 675 of the pre-war community of 12,000 survived the Holocaust.
They were led by Rabbi Richard Feder – who survived three concentration camps and succeeded Rabbi Elias Grunfeld, who took over from Rabbi Baruch Placzek as Chief Rabbi of Brno after his death in 1922 and Rabbi Albert Schon, the final pre-war rabbi at the shul. Both Schon and Grunfeld were murdered during the Holocaust. The modern community now worships at Agudas Achim, a shul deliberately hidden within an office building when it was constructed in the 1930s.
This is the only one of three synagogues in the city still standing. Remnants of the walls of the Great Synagogue were still visible in 1942, but were buried in a further demolition by the communist government in 1947.
“Today, finally, the City of Brno and the South Moravian region are beginning to commemorate the synagogue in a meaningful way,” says Dr Dolezel. “A large artistic mural has been created on the site where it once stood. And just a few weeks ago, Brno city council approved the renaming of Spálená Street to U Synagogy [Synagogue Street]”.
This year’s events on the site celebrating Czech Jewish culture will be particularly meaningful for the dozens of visiting descendants of Rabbi Baruch Placzek. It will also be attended by hundreds more attending Stetl Fest, the largest festival of Jewish culture in Europe. This includes events in the many magnificent villas built for Brno’s Jewish industrialists, which were stolen, like the synagogue site, by the state after their owners were forced to flee during the Holocaust. These include Villa Tugendhat, designed by world-renowned architect Mies van der Rohe, which won Brno a Unesco World Heritage Site designation, and Villa Stiassni, whose inhabitants landed briefly in Britain.
The more recently recovered Villa Wittal will become a permanent Jewish community centre once renovations are complete, but none of these mansions have ever been returned to the owners’ descendants. “The Czechoslovak state after the end of World War II behaved towards Jewish property in a similar way to the Nazi regime – it actually stole it,” adds Dolazel. “Some property was returned, but an enormous amount remained in the ownership of the cities or regions and was gradually taken into private ownership in the 1990s.”
Stetl Fest runs from August 26-30
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