On the first night of Hanukka, I stood in the splendid reception hall of the US
ambassador’s residence in Prague as the ambassador himself lit the first candle
in an imposing gilded menorah and chanted the blessings over the
flames.
Since it was the first night of the holiday, these included the
Shehecheyanu – the thankful blessing recited when reaching a special or
long-awaited moment: “Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe,
who has given us life, sustained us and allowed us to reach this
occasion.”
How strangely fitting to recite this, I thought, at this very
time and in this very place. Two days earlier Vaclav Havel had died, and many
people were still in shock at the loss of the shy dissident playwright who had
led the Velvet Revolution that ousted the communist regime in 1989 and gone on
to become Czechoslovakia’s – and then the Czech Republic’s – first democratic
president and enduring moral compass.
Masses of candles in Havel’s memory
were glowing on Wenceslas Square, site of the huge demonstrations that had
toppled the regime. And plans were going ahead for the somber state
funeral.
Why at this sad moment of mourning did I feel that the
Shehecheyanu was fitting?
It was because, in a way, I felt it was a blessing
that honored Havel himself, for without him and the impact he had had, this
Hanukka evening – and what it represented – could not have taken
place.
Joined by his family and a few guests, Ambassador Norman Eisen lit
the first candle ahead of his official holiday reception for hundreds of
diplomats and political and cultural figures. Throughout the evening, the
menorah blazed at one end of the hall, while a huge decorated Christmas tree,
placed there by the US government as part of its decoration of this public
space, glittered at the other.
“It’s my first Christmas tree ever,”
Eisen, the son of an Auschwitz survivor from the former Czechoslovakia and an
observant Jew who had had the residence kitchen koshered, joked to the crowd as
waiters threaded through with trays of latkes.
Eisen opened his welcoming
remarks by asking for a minute of silence in Havel’s honor. Then he told
the story of the residence – a mansion that had been built by a wealthy Jewish
family, the Petscheks, in the late 1920s. The family left in 1938, before World
War II broke out. During the war it served as the residence of the head
of the German army occupying Prague. Afterward, the mansion became
Czechoslovak property until 1948, when the United States purchased
it.
There were quite a few Jews at the reception, old friends of mine
from the Prague Jewish community such as Leo Pavlat, the director of the Prague
Jewish Museum, who delightedly told me how he and Eisen had seats next to each
other in synagogue. I was there to make a formal presentation of a big
website project I am coordinating on Jewish heritage in Europe.
I
couldn’t help but think back.
The postwar communist regime had carried
out a policy of persecution aimed at stifling Jewish life, and the
stateappointed community leadership had followed the party line, routinely
issuing statements critical of Israel. In May 1989, Pavlat had spearheaded a
group of young Prague Jews who sharply criticized these regime-approved
aparatchiks. He and his friends warned that Jewish life in Czechoslovakia
was “in danger of extinction.”
The Velvet Revolution, with Havel as its
reluctant hero, changed everything.
One of Havel’s first acts as
president was to reinstate full religious freedom. And one of his first state
trips abroad was to Israel – bringing with him an entourage of 180 Prague
Jews. By the end of 1990, Pavlat was serving as a diplomat in the
Czechoslovak embassy in Israel. He remained there until 1994, when he
returned to Prague and took up the directorship of the Jewish Museum.
At
the ambassador's reception, I reminisced about those heady days, and about
Havel’s impact, with Tomas Kraus, who has served as executive director of the
Federation of Czech Jewish communities since 1991. Kraus had helped organize
Havel’s first trip to Israel and had been part of the Jewish delegation that
accompanied him.
“It was exciting,” Kraus recalled. “It was part of the
‘Velvet Europhoria.’ Everything that we had not dared to dream of was
immediately possible. The Holy Land had been a philosophical term for us, an
image of something that you would never be able to reach – only in a dream. And
then, overnight, it was a reality.”
That trip to Israel, he said, was “a
very symbolic way to show what Czech foreign policy would be. It was a very
important sign of what his priorities would be.”
On the domestic front,
too, Kraus recalled, Havel had been extremely important. Not just with his
condemnation of anti- Semitism, but with the active role he played in addressing
issues such as restitution of Jewish property and in awarding one of the highest
state honors to Nicholas Winton, who organized the Czech kindertransport to
rescue some 669 mainly Jewish children on the eve of World War II.
“Today
we can look back into history over these past 22 years,” Kraus said. “Sometimes
you don’t realize that you are living through history. Havel’s passing will
leave a very big gap.
Since he left office, he was in a position without
concrete power. But sometimes a moral authority is stronger than
armies.”
The writer is author of National Geographic Jewish Heritage
Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe
and Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish
Culture in Europe.
She blogs on Jewish heritage issues at
http://jewish-heritage- travel.blogspot.com.).
Reprinted with permission
from JTA.