Resurrecting Memory of a Lost Community: In Search Of the Jewish History of Ledec

Since the mid-1930’s, Jirka Nettl had been managing an annual table tennis tournament in the Ledec Sokol House during vacations. He also organized a volleyball tournament at a soccer stadium below the train station. Top representatives of our  Czechoslovak Republic took part in these tournaments. He also had a role in several plays put on by the theater section of OREB. He loved modern music, and played the piano and saxophone with distinction in the band of his friend, Bedrich Grunfeld, who founded the Posazavi Jazz in 1937. The band played dance and popular music all year round in hotels. In our student group, we all liked Jirka for his cheerful and sociable nature. Some of us came to bid him farewell on the eve of the tragic June 9th, 1942, when together with his parents, Otta and Irma, brother Pavel and 41 other Ledec Jews were forced to embark on a trip to a Nazi concentration camp. None of us at that time expected that we will never see our friend Jirka again.

These words were written by Zdenek Vorlicek, now known as Frank. It was Frank who wrote me the email one day out of the blue, asking: “Are you the rabbi whose synagogue has our Torah from our synagogue?”

I knew what he meant. He was talking about the Holocaust Torah in the case outside Nickman Chapel. Frank knew we had the Torah because of an article that appeared in Prague’s main newspaper. But perhaps I should back up a bit, and explain how I came to know Frank and why my name and our synagogue appeared in the Czech news.

Legend has it that during the Holocaust, when Hitler decided to create a Museum to an Extinct people and gathered a large number of Jewish ritual objects in a warehouse in Prague. In actuality, a devoted group of Jews from Prague’s Jewish Community  proposed to bring together the possessions of provincial Jewry, which lay at the mercy of vandals and plunderers. These Jews hoped that these treasures would be protected and might one day be returned to their original homes. All the Museum’s curators were eventually transported to Terezin and Auschwitz, with only two survivors.

Their legacy and their gift to the Jewish world was the vast catalogued collection in what later again became the Jewish Museum in Prague. Among its collection was  1,564 Czech Memorial Scrolls – Torah scrolls. They were purchased from the Czechoslovak Communist state and taken back into Jewish hands in 1964 by Westminster Synagogue in London, to symbolize the dedication, vision and courage of the initiators’ plan and the teams of specialist curators who were recruited to implement it. As many of these Torah scrolls as possible were repaired and then loaned out to synagogues around the world to be used. Those that were not repairable were loaned out to synagogues to be displayed as a memorial to the communities from which they came.

It was Rabbi Schachter who contacted the Memorial Trust and arranged for the Torah scroll from Ledec to be displayed in our synagogue. He had wanted a scroll from which we could read but at that time the only scrolls still available were beyond reasonable repair. Working with a scribe, Rabbi Schachter also located a Torah scroll which this synagogue purchased, through the generosity of the Moskowitz family, from the Alt-Neu Shul in Prague. As you know we read from that scroll on every Rosh Chodesh and Holiday. It sits at the center of our ark.

Not long ago, the Memorial Trust contacted me asking to send scribes to inspect the Torahs and make sure they were being properly taken care of. The scribes came and were impressed by the Torah’s condition. Afterward I received a letter thanking us but indicating that we had not held to one of the conditions of the loan contract:  We were not displaying information about the community from which the Torah came. I wrote back promising we would correct that and asking if they had any information. They in turn sent me a piece of paper that said the Torah was from Ledec, and indicated that was sufficient. Well, we already had such a sign, so I began to wonder, what if we really created an exhibit that would not just say the Torah was from Ledec and that Ledec was destroyed by the Nazis, but would actually tell the story of Jewish life in Ledec and

celebrate the Jews who lived there.

It was around this time that our friend Murray Berkowitz first introduced me to his good friend Harvey Madvid. Harvey’s parents have both passed away, and Harvey was looking for a meaningful way to honor their memory.

Murray suggested they meet with me and that I might have some ideas. When I suggested this project to Harvey, he was very moved and embraced it with great enthusiasm.

And so the digging began. I contacted Yad Vashem and The US Memorial Holocaust Museum asking them to check their archives for information, testimony, pictures or artifacts from Ledec. Nothing. Neither institution knew that Ledec existed. There were no records of the community, of victims or survivors. The research department at the Holocaust Museum set to work, but after months of research had come up empty handed.

Then one day I received email from one of their researchers. She had found  aCzech encyclopedia and sent me a page. It was all n Czech except for one box which strangely was in English. The box indicated that there had been a small Jewish community in Ledec for centuries and that it was destroyed by the Nazis. It also stated that the synagogue had been recently renovated, that the mortuary building – that is, the Chevra Kadisha – was still standing and that its cemetery was known for its unusual headstones.

With the researcher’s help, I located the website for the Municipality of Ledec, and using Google Translate was able to locate the emails of the mayor, museum curator and director of historical buildings. I wrote to them explaining that we had their Torah and asking their help in uncovering the history of their Jewish community.

Months passed. There was no response. Then, out of the blue, an envelope comes addressed to me, no return address and no cover letter. It contains a 60 page book, Synagoga. I do not read Czech but a cursory glance told me it was something about the history of the Jews of Ledec.

With the help of a translation company, we have now translated the entire work into English. The book contains the history of the synagogue and community, eye witness testimony from the people of Prague, and a detailed description of the synagogue and its renovation. It is a deeply moving tale of a community that enjoyed very good, close, intimate relations wit hits Jews, and grieved over their having been ripped from their midst. It is a courageous attempt to confront the ugliness of the Nazi period and pay honor to their Jewish friends.

Which brings me back to Frank Vorlicek. When I wrote to the Mayor of Ledec, it seems he shared my email with the local newspaper in Prague, who in turn wrote an article about our synagogue. It was this article which prompted Mr. Vorlicek to contact me. He wanted to know if we indeed were the synagogue with the Torah from Prague, and he wanted to share with me his own friendships with his Jewish neighbors and his own eye witness account of the deportations.

Mr. Vorlicek may be the last living witness to the deportations from Ledec. We are having the first initial interview by phone this Monday, after which, with the help of the US Memorial Holocaust Museum, we will tape an interview. The interview and the book will be used to create a new expanded museum exhibit in our atrium that will indeed tell the story of the LIVES of the Jews of Ledec before they were snuffed out, and thus honor their memory. It will also tell the story of the deportation, what happened in the camps, and the tale of the few that survived. To the best of my knowledge, it will be the only such expanded exhibit in the world that focuses on a Memorial Trust Torah and its lost community in such vivid detail.

God willing, on or around next Yom Hashoah, we will dedicate the exhibit. We will also share the book, the interview and any other material with the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, Yad Vashem, the Library of Congress, and the four other congregations in North America who, according to the book, also have Torah scrolls from Ledec. Our school will also interview Mr. Vorlicek by Skype on their new smart boards this coming fall, and will use the interview, book and exhibit in their Holocaust studies.

I wanted to share this story with you on this Shabbat prior to this year’s Yom Ha-Shoah, to share my excitement over the project, and to publicly thank my new friend, Harvey Madvid for making this extraordinary venture possible. Harvey, as I have told you many times, in honoring your parents and showing your love for them, you have literally resurrected a lost community and restored it to its proper place in our collective memories.

As the years pass there are less and less survivors in our midst, and it becomes all the more incumbent upon us to keep alive the stories and testimonies that ensure that no one forgets.

May the memory of the suffering and death of those from Ledec who perished in the Shoah stand as a testimony to the truth of the Holocaust and its horrors, and motivate us to work o eradicate anti-Semitism and all forms of hatred form our world. May the life stories of the Jews of Ledec motivate us to live proudly as Jews and to deepen our commitment to our people and our heritage. Amen.