ALT-NEU KOLíN

Rabbi Andrew Goldstein writes about the May 2025 visit of the North London Ark synagogue members to their associated Scroll towns of Kolín and Třeboň.

I have been to Kolín many times and led many a tour there and always look forward to returning. But early this year, I did think, is there anything new to experience? Yet at the end of May we organized a tour for the 80th anniversary of the return of a few survivors of the Holocaust to the town, but we have been there to commemorate the 50th, 60th and 70th anniversaries of the deportations. I had spoken at a couple of exhibition openings, we had brought the lonely synagogue alive with our choir singing and once filling it with a party of 80, there to perform the “Stones of Kolín” in the town theatre. We have initiated and swum in the river Labe on the Hana Greenfield Memorial Swim, dedicated memorial plaques, and received civic honours. 

So many “Alt”, old experiences, but this time we started with the “Neu: the synagogue packed with senior school students to hear a lecture by Dr. Mirka Jouza, the local historian and our dear friend. She was basically asking : how did the few Jews survive? And I learnt many things, but also that most of the survivors came from mixed-marriages. The Nazis did not deport such Jews until 1944 (unlike the others in 1942) and so they had to endure a shorter time in the camps. Many other fascinating details. Then I spoke about the most prominent survivor, Rabbi Dr Richard Feder, who led the returnees on 31st May 1945, having lost every member of his family in the Shoah.

And my abiding memory – the 120 or more teenage students sitting there through an hour and a half of lectures totally absorbed, concentrating on every word. Then another experience: amongst the students was a young Jewish girl: Any Ehrlich. You can imagine her excitement at being at a Jewish event; she the only Jew in the school and in the neighborhood. We must make sure our KT class, when they visit in October, give her another Jewish experience and keep in touch with her. Any’s parents came with her to the Friday night service and her mother brought two fabulous challat she had baked.

Saturday morning we were joined by Rabbi David Maxa and members of his Ec Chajim congregation from Prague. He brought a [MST#1052] Torah scroll with him and his organist Professor Selig played the harmonium up in the gallery, maybe the first time for decades. I had assumed it was defunct.

After the service another new experience, off to three local towns with Jewish connections. Their communities had also been deported from Kolín and Rabbi Feder had ministered to their very few survivors after the Shoah. Čáslav with its newly restored synagogue where I picked up a book about the Malín synagogue, the original home of our Arch around our ark. On to Golčův Jeníkov where Erna Meissner’s family lived – she grew up there with her grandfather Rabbi Moises Blan. (Another coincidence: he was the last rabbi in Třeboň before moving to Golčův Jeníkov). Erna was another survivor and before and after the War served as Rabbi Feder’s secretary in Kolín. She was one of the inspirations behind our now annual Kolín Swim, and used to come to our annual “Czech & Slovak Shabbat. That evening we went to Podĕbrady and visited the former Jewish care home where Olga Federerova was head nurse: she donated many valuable Holocaust ephemera to our collection.

Then on to Prague for a Shavuot evening service together with Ec Chajim….in the historic Klausen Synagogue, the first Shavuot service held there after the Holocaust and it was a Liberal service. It was sponsored by the Prague Jewish Museum, another sign of the acceptance of Liberal Judaism in the country. Walking back to the hotel in the dark, past the Alt Neu Synagogue, it look particularly mystical, not surrounded by hordes of tourists.

Finally, a day trip to Třeboň in southern Bohemia. The Třeboň Torah scroll was the second one we had obtained from the Memorial Scrolls Trust (in 1971). I had visited Třeboň a few times and knew it had little of real Jewish interest. Just a disused synagogue and a cemetery. We found that the simple synagogue that had been turned into a domestic house was now deserted and heard that the Jewish community in Prague had taken it back and we can only hope, turning it back into a synagogue, maybe as a museum. (The last rabbi of Třeboň was the Rabbi Blan who had moved on to Golčův Jeníkov.) What was new? Stolpersteine in two places, three together in the town square dedicated to the Metzl family. Their living descendants had not only dedicated the Stolpersteine but re-erected the impressive gravestone to Ludvik Metzl who was the first chairman of the community and founder of the cemetery hidden in a local forest. We had to beat a hasty retreat as the cemetery was infested by new guardians – dangerous Lyme disease ticks.

Our guides were a couple of retired (non-Jewish) Professors and they brought with them a teenager from the local High School that had been given a grant from a British Jew who arrived on the Kindertransport. A grant to get the students involved in projects connected with Jewish history and fighting anti-Semitism. Marian Pilarcik was enthusiastically engaged in the project, and valued his new experience: meeting living Jews for the first time! We will keep in touch. As we stood by the Metzl Stolpersteine, Rabbi Lea produced another Neu moment as she and Google immediately found on her phone a picture of Victor Metzl – research that in the past took hours realized on the keypad of a phone!

Alt Neu touring, plenty of memories from the past, but it turned out, many new experiences in yet another NPLS/Ark tour to our Torah Towns.