The Miracle Of Jewish Revival In Prague – OpEd

David Klein and RNS reports that Rabbi David Maxa, who organized the Day of Atonement observance in one of Prague's 17th-century synagogues, said the moment 'is not just a revival of our prayers, but a powerful testament to the resilience and continuity of our Jewish tradition.'

On Saturday October 12 for the first time in more than 80 years, the city's progressive Jewish community, Ec Chajim, hosted Yom Kippur services in its 330-year-old building.

Though not the oldest, Klausen is the city's largest synagogue and thelast standing exampleof baroque synagogue architecture in Prague, itself once a major center of European Jewish history. Its Jewish community yielded several notable figures, including novelist Franz Kafka and former U.S. Secretary of StateMadeleine Albright.

In the 17th century, Klausen Synagogue was home to a school founded by Rabbi Judah Loew, more commonly known as "the Maharal," a major rabbinic figure who today is mostly remembered for his association with the mythicalgolem of Prague, an earthly robot he allegedly created to fight back against antisemitic persecution.

The synagogue has largely been a museum since the Nazis decimated Czechoslovakia's Jewish community in the Holocaust. Before this year the last services in Klausen were held in 1941. In October of that year, the Nazis began their deportations of Czech Jews to ghettos and concentration camps, where the overwhelming majority would perish.

Before the Second World War, nearly 120,000 Jews lived in Czechoslovakia's Bohemian and Moravian regions, which make up today's Czechia. By the war's end, only 17,000 of them were left alive, and today only 3,500 call the country home, most of whom live in the capital, Prague.

The return to one of Prague's most prominent synagogues also speaks to the resilience of Maxa's own community. Rabbi Maxa, 38, the son of a Holocaust survivor who fathered him late in life, is the only Reform rabbi in Czechia, where most Jewish institutions, as in much of Europe, are Orthodox.

But Reform Judaism is not something alien to Prague: Liberal Jewish movements first began to take shape in Central Europe in the late 1700s.

In the wake of the Holocaust and repression of religion under 70 years of communist rule in Czechoslovakia many Czechs cut their ties with the Jewish community. Rabbi Maxa's father was one of them. "For him and for many of his generation, Jewish identity was a kind of stigma, and also it had a certain trauma with it," Maxa explained.

However, the Velvet Revolution, which toppled the anti-religious Soviet-backed regime in 1989, also led to a resurgence of Jewish life that has continued in the former Czechoslovakia, which separated into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992. (Though officially still the Czech Republic, the country adopted the name Czechia in 2016.)

Rabbi Maxa said this history supports his belief that the 3,500 self-identified Jews in Czechia live among a potentially much larger pool of those with some Jewish ancestry. In 2019, Maxa and a cadre of collaborators founded Ec Chajim for those interested in connecting with that heritage."There are people with many Jewish biographies here in Prague,"

Rabbi Maxa explained. "There are people who grew up Jewishly. There are people who didn't grow up so, but who then later found out that their roots were Jewish. There are also people who decided to become Jewish without any previous connections with Judaism. And there are also all sorts of other stories."

Maxa himself began to explore his Jewish identity as a teenager in the 2000s and eventually decided to pursue rabbinical studies. After graduating from Abraham Geiger College, a Jewish seminary in Germany, and then Hebrew Union College in New York, the rabbi returned to Prague.

Czechia, which is the most irreligious country in Europe, with nearly half of its population not identifying as affiliated with any faith.

The Yom Kippur service gave Rabbi Maxa hope that Judaism has a diverse future in Prague. "I would say the strongest moment was when we were singing one of the prayers I prepared with the children from our community. The children, without being asked, came to the bimah and all of them — it must have been about 30 or 40 children — started to sing that prayer together with us," Rabbi Maxa said.

And I add that national, communal, minority, tribal, and religious communities can survive, revive, and be restored and redeemed, in our lifetime or in the lifetime of our future generations. It has happened before; and it will happen again; if we keep alive our hope and our faith. Let us learn from a 15 year old Jewish girl who lived and died during WW2 and wrote in her diary:

"It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death.

I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again. In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the day will come when I shall be able to carry them out." ~Anne Frank"