A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [118]
In Prague, Brno, and Bratislava, the Dubcek era was a time when the postwar generation of Jews started to openly express their Jewishness. Synagogue attendance increased, and social meetings and community functions became regular events. The head Czech rabbi, Richard Feter, who lived in Brno, had been quietly giving instruction to Jews on request. But now he could run a full-scale Jewish Community, even if it was only for a few hundred. He gave open lectures on Judaism and supervised community celebrations of Jewish holidays. For the first time in their lives, a new generation of Jews experienced Judaism as a living culture, and they participated excitedly, forming a range of youth groups with meetings, discussions, and social events. In 1968 Prague, suddenly the eighteenth-century Jewish town hall, the rococo building on Mais-lova Street next to the Old-New Synagogue, was a lively place with young people rushing up and down the dark wood stairways. Bratislava had its own rabbi and a Jewish youth group that more than fifty people attended every week. Being Jewish was now something more than becoming worried when you read the newspaper.
ZUZANA SKALOVA was seven years old, and her sister Eva was nine. Although Skalova is the feminine ending for the family name, Skala, originally their father had been named Spitz. But once he returned from Denmark where he had been saved during the war, he thought it would be safer to have a typical Czech name. He married a Jewish woman whose name had been Gerty Kirchner, although her parents had always cautioned her that it was safer to just use her middle name, Rene. She survived There-sienstadt and was looked after by an uncle named Schonhauser, who by coincidence had also changed his name to Skala because it would be safer. And so one fake Skala married another.
When Eva was born, the Skalas gave her the Jewish name Eva Ruth, and for a fee they had it officially registered at the Jewish Community in Prague. By the time Zuzana was born, they thought better of this and told her that her name was Shoshana, but they didn't register it. For Passover the girls would go to a seder at the Jewish town hall with about two hundred other children. Their parents were members of the Community, but they only went to synagogue for major holidays. One day when Zuzana was in the second grade, one of her schoolmates ran around the classroom saying, “Don't talk to Zuzana, she's Jewish.” Zuzana knew she was Jewish and didn't take this accusation very seriously—until she realized that it worked. No one in the class would talk to her for the rest of the day.
In 1968 things were different. The girls started going to Hebrew lessons, and there were meetings for children every Saturday afternoon. While the Skalas never observed the Sabbath, now they often met their daughters after their lessons and took them next door to the Old-New Synagogue for the Havdalah service marking the end of the Sabbath. It was a popular service for children, and the youngest child would get to hold the candle that is extinguished.
The newspapers also were different. Far from threatening Jews in coded language, they were now denouncing anti-Semitism as a political tool. The millennium of Prague Jewry was rescheduled as a major international event, to take place in June 1969.
For seven and a half months Czechoslovakia was an exciting place. Not the least of the new