From Bohemian and Moravian to Czech Jewry

In no other period of history of the Bohemian Lands was the pressure for national and linguistic assimilation of Jews stronger than in the period from the 1950s to the 1980s. The genocide of Jews and Roma during the war and emigration of most of the Zionist oriented Jews from Czechoslovakia, together with the expulsion of most German speakers from the country, laid the groundwork for a wide-ranging and thorough communist program of nationalist homogenization. With the cresting of the Stalinist antisemitic purge and the ban on Jewish emigration in 1951-1952, the regime enforced Czech national ideology in schools, culture, politics and media, restricted migration and the exchange of information, and criminalized contacts with abroad. In this chapter we will focus on the impact of this external (and changing) pressure on Jewish religious, political and social life, including the community’s Holocaust commemoration strategies. Although the Jewish population was only a remnant, of the once great community, it still loomed large in the eyes of the country’s rulers. In my paper I will, however, focus on diversity within this moment of repressive conformity– for example, on the huge discrepancies between Prague and the communities in the border regions re-established after the war primarily by the Jews from Carpathian Ruthenia (which had been annexed by the Soviet Union).