Worship, Zionism, Forgiveness: Thoughts in Prague's Jewish Ghetto | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Worship, Zionism, Forgiveness: Thoughts in Prague’s Jewish Ghetto

We spent this morning in Prague’s old Ghetto and Jewish quarter.

Jewish people have lived in Prague for a millennium—subjected to a variety of petty restrictions: for a while the only trades open to them were the rag trade and the usury. They had to wear distinctive hats and ruffs and badges, which exposed them to persecution, they were regarded as the personal property of the King under the Statuta Judaeorum, subjected to pogroms and extortion.

The Spanish Synagogue was modelled on the Alhambra in Granada. It was a privilege to be inside a synagogue, and to walk up to the place where the Torah was stored for instance, well beyond the balcony reserved for women. I do not remember going to a synagogue before, though Roy says I must have.

As is appropriate in a baroque city, it was entirely too much. Absolutely gorgeous, but too much. Ornate, colourful, gold and ruby and sapphire in fantastical geometrical patterns. Absolutely lavish. I felt as I did in the Cloud Forest in Costa Rica. There was so much, such a profusion of loveliness that I did not know what to focus on or to take in first.

The places humans devise to worship God are very interesting. Some like the Puritans wanted simplicity and purity. I am with them. Some, like Archbishop Suger, who designed Saint-Denys in Paris, and who is credited with introducing stained glass in cathedrals, and with the invention of Gothic itself, wanted “More Light” as Suger said, coloured light.

If I had to devise a place of worship, it would be a simple Gothic cathedral, maybe not as high-roofed as Amiens, but still immense, with long lancet windows, with alternately stained glass and natural green views outside. It would be set in a place of natural loveliness, in the kind of surroundings the Cistercians chose in Riveaux for instance.

The reverence for the Torah was moving—massive bejewelled Torah crowns, Torah shields, Torah pointers, finials, covers. These had been gathered here from all over Eastern Europe by Hitler who wished to construct a Museum to an Extinct Race. What wickedness—wanting the destruction of an entire race.

Hitler’s pathological hatred of the Jews, the immense amount of time, organization, energy and resources he devoted towards his Final Solution was irrational—and one of the factors in his speedy downfall, most historians agree. However, as we observed the historical evidences of anti-semitism in the museum, it was clear that Hitler was not acting in a vacuum. Part of his demonizing of the Jewish people was shrewd political calculation. Jews were conjured up as the enemy to distract the populace from the miseries of hyper-inflation in the Weimar Republic, unemployment, and the crippling burden of reparations. And the holocaust would never have occurred without the tacit consent, encouragement, delight and collaboration of hundreds of thousands of people. I found the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. unbearably painful and did not go through the whole thing. One of the documentaries I remember is the gloating faces in the crowd watching Jews clear the rubble after Kristallnacht or Allied bombing raids, and the sheer exhaustion on the faces of the suited victims who had their businesses trashed, and then had to clear the wreckage.

The Pinkasova Synagogue had a chilling list, every inch of wall space covered of the names, dates of birth, and dates of death or transportation to the death camps of 80,000 Jews. It is the longest epitaph in the world, though of course, it only represents a fraction of those who died in the camps.

Artists, writers, musicians, scientists, academics, psychologists, doctors—what an immeasurable loss of individuals who had lived, and learned and suffered and thought before they could transmit their learning and life experience to the next generation. What a loss too of ordinary men and women, repositories of a wonderful oral tradition before it could be transmitted to succeeding generations.

Hitler’s Final Solution was to render the Jewish race e
xtinct. He did not succeed in this, of course. Though, he did partially succeed in his diabolical purpose. The vivid, quirky, eccentric, Eastern Jewish life of the ghettos and shetls celebrated in the stories of Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Bashevis Singer or the paintings of Max Chagall no longer exists. And the world is the poorer for it.

Kafka grew up in the Jewish ghetto, though since his father was upwardly mobile he left it. However, the destruction of the old ghetto to make room for lavish five storey mansions on prime real estate left profound scars on his psyche. As a German speaker among Czechs who hated Germans, as a Jew among German speakers who hated Jews, and as an agnostic among believers, Kafka lived in a constant state of fear, the angst he describes.

The list of writers, playwrights, painters, musicians, academics, and scientists who either perished under or fled from Hitler is immense. What an vast amount of Jewish talent!! The victims of pogroms, fines, forced migrations, extortion of much of their history in Europe, European Jews tended to invest in the intangible–in scholarship, learning, culture, song, family ties, tradition, scripture. One would think that with all this Jewish talent amassed in Israel, we would have seen an unparalled flowering of culture, literature, and the arts. But we haven’t really.

Perhaps standing outside the party, your nose pressed against the window, is what gives you the clearest view. Being an outsider helps you see the inside most clearly. While the psychological advantages of being an insider are considerable, you no longer have the vantage point of the outsider with which to view the party, the perspective of distance, the artistic tool of defamiliarization which helps you and your reader see things more clearly.

My husband Roy’s post-doctoral advisor at Stanford University, a old worldly Jew called Gene Golub told me that before the second World War, the Jewish culture of the shetls and ghettos was described as yiddishkeit, which I understood as an Old Worldly gentleness, sweetness, courtliness, courtesy, even unworldliness. I have sometimes encountered it, and it is charming. After the trauma of the Holocaust, Golub told me, the Jewish psyche and culture changed. Their watchword became “Never Again.” What a dreadful psychological burden to live under!! The Israelis describe themselves as Sabras, prickly on the outside, sweet on the inside.

Not long after my conversation with Golub, Roy and I took a flight from JFK to Israel, where Roy was speaking at a Conference around the time of Succoth. The plane was full of Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn going to Israel for the festival—black clad, black hatted, ringlets to die for on either side of their faces, tassels, scrolls on their forehead, the works. At the correct time, they all stood up in unison, whipped out their prayer books, and proceeded to chant in unison, with synchronized bowing.

We hit turbulence. They continued unperturbed, though their swaying now owed something to atmospheric disturbance. They steadfastly ignored all pleas to sit down by the increasingly agitated stewardess. Their chanting and bowing and swaying continued unabated. Finally, she announced over the intercom, “Could any Hebrew speaker here ask these guys to sit down?” knowing full well that they were New York Jews and understood every word she said as well as she did!!

Never again. What an enormous psychological burden to grow up with!! It is just the opposite of the philosophy taught by the Jewish Messiah, Yeshua or Jesus—though where his philosophy led him to in the short run is a matter of historical record.

Interestingly, Gandhi who achieved one of the most amazing Velvet Revolutions in the history of mankind by following the Nazarene’s principles of non-violence (and Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience) counselled the Jews of Europe not to resist Hitler. I wonder what would have happened if they had resisted him even less than they did?

* * *

At the end of this day full of thought and emotion, we walked through the Old Jewish Cemetery, Beit Hayyim, House of Life, full of massive gravestones. The same half acre or so has been used as a graveyard for a millennium. It was massively overcrowded as the ghettos were in life, people were buried twelve deep. Pretty much all the ground was taken up by a pell-mell assortment of gravestones, large, small, intricately carved in Hebrew. Masses of them.

Irene asked as we walked home, “Will the Jews ever forgive Hitler? Will the Jews ever forgive the Germans.”

Interestingly, that was the question Elie Wiesel asks in The Sunflower. As I remember it: A German commando, dying in pain, tells Wiesel how the SS crowded a village of Jews into a house, doused it with petrol, set it alight. He sees a man and a woman hold a child out of a window, put their hands over his eyes, and then jump. He shoots. Dying, in pain, he asks for a Jew, any Jew, to ask for forgiveness. Wiesel, seeing him blinded, dying, in immense pain, walks away, silently. The German dies, unforgiven.

Should he have forgiven him? Wiesel asks a panel of thinkers. Most said No.

And what did I answer Irene, aged 11, who asked me if the Jews and Israel would ever forgive the Germans. I said, “Yes. They will. They have to. They cannot go through life bearing the psychological burden of the wrong done to their families. They cannot be Atlas bearing the weight of all that evil on their shoulders. They have to toss that wrong into the dustbin of history. They have to forgive. They need not forget, but they have to forgive. For their own sakes. For the sake of their children. For the sake of their children yet unborn.

Because, in an irony of history I do not understand, those who cannot forgive or forget a wrong done to them WILL REPEAT THAT WRONG. It is an inexorable law. The bullied becomes a bully. The abused become abusers. Those who cannot forget the Nazis may repeat their conduct when they hold the reins of power.

We saw moving exhibitions today of anti-semitism through the millennia. We left convinced that the Jews undoubtedly need a homeland of their own, and why not the homeland promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a homeland to which they are perhaps physiologically and psychologically adapted? But please, Israel, treat the Palestinian people who also love the land, as you would have wished to be treated in the long centuries of your exile, when by the rivers of the Vlatva, or Don or Danube, you sat down and wept as you remembered Zion, and wistfully said, “Next year in Jerusalem.”