Trampling on graves?

Prague's Jewish Quarter was recently discussed as a potential target of Czech neo-Nazis' provocations during the anniversary of the murderous Kristallnacht pogrom in Nazi Germany. But I hear that even the rest of us – whether we like it or not – also trample on destroyed monuments when walking in Prague's pedestrian zone, the so-called Golden Cross, the pavement of which was allegedly made under the communist regime of destroyed Jewish tombstones. How much is that true?

Josef Pepíno Maraczi

We asked Tomáš Kraus, secretary of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic. We also drew on coverage in the local magazine Roš chodeš [Rosh Khodesh].

Tomáš Kraus:„I have seen cobblestones with Hebrew writings on their underside with my own eyes. I don't know exactly where they came from, but I've heard they were used at some point in the 1980s to pave not only the Golden Cross but also the whole Royal Way, which starts in Celetná Street. After November 1989 we obviously enquired about what happened with Jewish cemeteries under communism and found out that gravestones from dozens of devastated and almost obliterated cemeteries were sold en masse to various stonecutting firms. I have recently read somewhere that the infamous ‚Godfather‘ [František] Mrázek was involved in this ‚trade‘. We have no evidence on how this worked and how many gravestones fell pray to the ‚production‘ of cobbles.“

This did not happen only in Prague. After the war there was a whole tradition of removing stones from Jewish cemeteries to serve as „building material“. In a number of Czech towns, ordinary citizens used to dismantle Jewish graves and use the stones to pave their backyards or walkways. The story goes that in Roudnice nad Labem people bulldozed a cemetery wall with a lorry to get good access to „their material“.

According to the Jewish Community, the pre-1989 tombstone trade even involved some former officials of the Jewish Community itself (some of them Communist Party members). They sold granite from newer cemeteries and thus effectively contributed to their destruction.

„Prague's Jewish Community sold gravestones by [square] metre. The buyers were socialist organisations,“ reports a 1998 article in Roš Chodeš, a magazine published by the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic. The Jewish officials knew very well how religious Jews revered cemeteries and the peace of graves and what a transformation of tombstones into cobblestones meant for them: Tombstones invoke God's name or cite from the sacred text of the Torah, which must not be trampled on.