The heroic rabbi of Terezin is remembered at the Czech Republic’s biggest festival of Jewish culture

Instead of fleeing, he accompanied 520 Kolin Jews to Terezin, where he was one of only 40 to survive. He lost his own family – the love of his life, Hilda, their three children and grandchildren – while in the camp, but never lost faith, ministering to inmates alongside Rabbi Leo Baeck. He ended the war as a rare 70-year-old survivor of a camp from which the elderly were among the first to be deported to the death camps, and returned to Kolin to rebuild the synagogue and cemetery. At 78  he took the call from Brno instead of retiring, and lived there until his death. He inaugurated an annual, painful pilgrimage to Terezin and earned recognition from the Czech state for his efforts to fight fascism and restore Jewish life to the country.

Rabbi Richard Feder[Missing Credit]

“He has been a hero of mine since learning about the Torah scroll we inherited from his synagogue in Kolin when the communists sold scrolls off in 1966 to get in hard currency,” says Rabbi Andrew Goldstein, emeritus rabbi of the Ark Synagogue in Northwood, Middlesex, former chair of the European Union for Progressive Judaism and a former president of Liberal Judaism. He has been a key figure in establishing Reform communities in post-communist Czechia and Slovakia, visiting every year since 1980.
 

Petra Goldflamová Štětinová created the art for the exhibition[Missing Credit]

Goldstein is not the only British link with this year’s Stetl Fest, where Felix Englesmann, who escaped to Britain just one day before the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, will be posthumously remembered. His family established a prosperous textiles firm and built a palace in the city. Fleeing with his wife Olga, he moved the Bruck and Englesmann business to Huddersfield, taking over the plant and materials of the city’s Taylor Hill Mills.

Stetl Fest, running from August 27 to 31 in Brno, will also tell the story of Czech refugees in Norway, show magazines made by children in Terezin, host klezmer, jazz and swing concerts and offer Hebrew classes as well as a Shabbat candle-lighting ceremony and havdalah celebrations.

Jewish architectural heritage tours will include the Art Deco synagogue that survived the Nazis by being hidden behind an unmarked façade and some of the many magnificent villas built for Jewish tycoons. These include Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat, a World Heritage Site that will play host to several festival events.

Now another grand residence in a town rich in mansions commissioned by Brno’s many prosperous Jewish families, Villa Wittal, is being renovated to become a permanent Jewish cultural hub for a city whose community has so gained in numbers and strength that a Shabbat dinner for nearly 100 will be a key event of the festival.

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Rabbi Feder Superhero will be on show until August 2026 at Villa Arnold, Brno