A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [176]
Among the Jews of the Community, the taboo words were sometimes whispered: “It makes me ill to see German tourists walking on Jewish graves.”
“I know,” Feuerlicht responded when the son of a Theresien-stadt survivor said this. “But tourism brings in money. It helps us.” The only other synagogue, the elaborately decorated, dusty Moorish-style Jubilee, with its tiled arches and turn-of-the-century grandeur, did not get the tourists. Its congregation still prayed in an austere room off of the balcony, with plaster patches on the walls and a bare heating pipe protruding. In the late 1890s, when Jews were moving out of the ghetto and into more fashionable Prague neighborhoods, the Jubilee had been built in what seemed an excellent location. How could they have known that one day this synagogue would have difficulty finding minyans because it was just a few blocks off the tourist beat?
Tomas Kraus, as the new Community director, had inherited a painful problem in the form of the state-owned Jewish Museum, which included the cemetery, the Maisel Synagogue, and the rich collection of antique Judaica that Heydrich had stolen from deported Jews. The new Czechoslovakian state agreed to turn over to the Community the handsome sums now earned in tourist entry fees at each site. The government wanted to privatize and was selling off state industries to private small-scale investors. It would have been happy to turn over all Jewish property to the Community. And the Community would have liked to take it all over. It wanted to do things differently—broaden the displays and change the presentations to give more of an appreciation of living Judaism. As it was, it almost resembled Heydrich's dream, an exhibit of an extinct people, their unused ritual objects on display in the unused Maisel Synagogue. Kraus described the display of artifacts under the graceful, vaulted ceiling of the Maisel as, “breathing death on a shelf.” It was difficult to look at the neat rows of silver To rah pointers and not think about booty stolen from deported Jews—an empty synagogue full of the relics of annihilated Jews.
The struggling Community with one thousand members could not afford to run all this, however. It had other priorities, such as the newly privatized Jewish hospital and a home for the elderly, which opened in the fall of 1993. But before the Community had even taken possession of all these treasures, it was bombarded with advice from Americans and Israelis. One Israeli group wanted to arrange to have the entire collection moved to Israel. The Community was furious. It had struggled to keep the collection together in this country, in spite of the willingness of the Communists to sell it off, a piece at a time, when there was a good offer. Like the old Communist regime, these Israelis had argued that Jewish things belonged in Israel, not in Czechoslovakia. Wassermann delivered so many angry tirades about American and Israeli Jewish organizations that in 1992 the board voted him out of the presidency. The Federation of Jewish Communities simply could not have a president who shouted at visiting Jews. “Why are American Jews always trying to tell us how things should be done?” Wassermann would shout. “What are you doing here? Why don't you leave? This is where we live! And the Israelis are even worse! They