A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [179]
As cantor, Neufeld had drawn a salary from the Communist state that was continued after the revolution. But the Community had a double burden: the state had returned all its property but had cut all state subsidies. The theory was that the Community could earn its own money from the property. But the property included forty-six Jewish cemeteries scattered throughout southern Moravia and thirty buildings, most of which had either been abandoned or used for storage. Not only did the property not earn income, most of it would cost money to restore. The only income-earner was a building with a television station, which started paying rent. About thirty new people had become active Jews after the Velvet Revolution. Many of them were people like Milana Mandl —in their forties and educated in the liberal days of Dubcek.
Brno's discreet synagogue with its plain exterior was still operating on Friday nights and Saturday mornings. On a major holiday it could get thirty people. But this included non-Jews, more and more of whom had been showing up for services since the revolution. Some explained that they were Christians interested in the Jewish roots of their religion. Others seemed to think they were making an anti-Communist statement.
Neufeld restored the Jewish cemetery, and occasional mourners still turned up on the now well-trimmed tree-lined grounds to place a stone on a grave. The coffins were made from unstained, untreated wood, according to Jewish law. The dead were still buried in the traditional white smocks, with a small sachet of soil from Israel placed under the head. But it was getting increasingly difficult to find Jews for the funerals, and Jewish law states that the body must be prepared by Jews.
“I worry about what will happen when I am gone,” Neufeld often confided to Martin Mandl. Mandl wondered, too, because neither he nor anyone else in town had the knowledge to take Neufeld's place. Two people from Brno went to study in Israel, and it was hoped they would be back in a few years.
In 1992, Brno had its first open Community Passover seder since Dubcek. It was the first seder Martin Mandl had ever been to. With the same natural enthusiasm with which he dragged people to the Janacek house, he was trying to learn and teach his two children. Both he and his wife wanted their children to have a Jewish education, although they would have to convert if they wanted to be Jews. When their bright and serious daughter, Ver-onika, was 13, they sent her to Israel for one month. Before she went, she did not think of herself as Jewish, but after one month in summer camp she was not only ready to convert but, like her aunt twenty-four years earlier, was ready to move there. It was almost useless for Martin to talk to her about building Jewish life in Brno because there was only one other Jew of her age in town. “I like being Jewish,” said Veronika, “And in Czechoslovakia there are not a lot of Jews. Jewish holidays are very sad here. In Israel they are a lot of fun.”
“This is what the Israelis teach,” said Martin with a tone of resignation. “You must leave here. You must go back to Israel. No matter what you are doing, Europe is only tragedy. For two thousand years it has been only tragedy for Jews. You must leave. That is what we keep hearing from Israel.”
But Mandl did not think that way. Not now. Not after all those years of compromise and patience. “For twenty years a great source of information was the Voice of America in Czech/’ he said. “About fifteen years ago I heard a commentator say, ‘During the next twenty or thirty years, all Jewish life in Czechoslovakia will die/And I thought, yes, that's right. But since ‘89, it's not certain. It's a question. But we must help ourselves.”
Even without conversions or a high birthrate the Jewish population has kept growing. New Jews seemed to get unearthed in the society. In 1992 there were officially one thousand