Perhaps no nation has undergone such a complex history as the Jews. A thousand years of denial of their historical claim to a homeland, persecution and pogroms in other countries, culminated in Hitler's Germany's recent effort to exterminate the Jews altogether. Yet equally few nations have preserved such great vitality, an innate sense of belonging, and the ability to establish themselves not only in their own land but anywhere in the world. It is therefore entirely natural that the study of Jewish settlement in many countries of the world, particularly in Europe, has received considerable attention – though the results have not always been presented with complete historical accuracy and without distortion.
A certain shortcoming of previous research has been that it mostly focused on towns, leaving villages neglected. One of the villages where a Jewish community existed for nearly three hundred years is Slatina near Horažďovice. In terms of the extent of Jewish settlement – a ghetto, synagogue, school and cemetery – Slatina is in its own way unique.
The village and early centuries
The village of Slatina was founded around 1150. Around 1220 a small monastic court was established and built up here. The Convent of St. George, which played a considerable part in the colonisation of this area, owned the court in Slatina for 56 years, until 1284, when Bishop Tobias sold it to a Lord Bohuslav, Burgrave of Zvíkov Castle, for 170 silver marks. Thereafter several noble families held the estate in succession, and in 1691 Slatina was purchased by Václav Lev Jindřich Kunáš of Machovic.
Arrival of the Jews (1691)
The ownership of Slatina by the Kunáš family brought a marked change to the life of the village. The Kunáš family, following the example of many other noblemen, began gradually settling Jews on their estate in Slatina. They allowed them to rent some abandoned cottages and provided land for the construction of their own dwellings, which formed the foundation of the Slatina ghetto. These Jews engaged mainly in grain and cattle trade, door-to-door commerce and money-lending. Enjoying the protection of the Kunáš family as "Schutzjuden" – protected Jews – they had to pay their patron a considerable share of their income.
Jewish religious services were already being held at this time, as evidenced by the establishment of a Jewish cemetery, which was officially permitted by Václav Ferdinand Kunáš of Machovic in a deed issued in 1723. The oldest records of the burial of Jews from Slatina and the surrounding area at the local cemetery date from 1668.
Ghetto, synagogue, school, cemetery
The original cemetery, according to the founding deed measuring 8 × 8 sáhů (15 × 15 metres), was later extended to its current 58 × 28 metres and enclosed with a stone wall. Above the entrance was placed a plaque bearing a Hebrew inscription: "BAIS MOUEVITS L'CHOLCHAI. KHI UFOR ATHU VAEL UFOR THOŠUF" (House of assembly of all the living. Dust and earth you are, and to dust and earth you shall return). Today approximately 172 tombstones of two types survive at the cemetery. The granite ones are mostly plain, without ornamentation, now largely illegible. The second group consists of limestone stelae, usually topped with an arch and decorated with stylised folk floral motifs. The Slatina religious community encompassed 12 villages, but Jews from a much wider area were buried at the cemetery.
The original synagogue was wooden, on four load-bearing wooden columns, very small – approximately 8 × 6 metres – and stood at the centre of the ghetto. In 1868 the Jewish community purchased a new plot of land from J. Podlešák for 500 gulden and erected a new brick building, imposing by village standards, in the form in which it has been restored today. It housed a school, a dwelling and a prayer hall. The Jewish school, whose origins date to the end of the 17th century, ceased operation in 1893 due to the declining number of children; it was also in that year that the last rabbi, Gottlieb Schlessner, departed. Among the teachers, let us name at least Michael Kohn, Filip Weiskopf and Izák Schwarz, who served here until 1872 and was very popular for his services not only to the Jewish community but to the village of Slatina as a whole. Jewish teachers were frequently advisors and helpers to the local village magistrates and mayors.
The religious community was led by an autonomous committee of elected representatives and headed by a community chairman. This committee dealt at its meetings with the affairs of the Jewish community, the annual budget, the upkeep of the synagogue and school, contributions to the district rabbinate in Blatná, support for poorer co-religionists, charitable donations and other matters.
Peak of the community (1834)
In 1834, 17 families lived here, always in a single room, and in some cases two families shared one room. It is hard for us today to imagine the living conditions when families were large – ten children or more, sometimes even more than that. The houses were mostly wooden, combined with stone and large unfired clay bricks.
For example, in 1846, 19 families numbering 110 people lived in 11 cottages, representing a third of the village's inhabitants. A further 19 Jews lived among "Christians". The main core of the Jewish ghetto in Slatina consisted of a row of stone-and-clay cottages measuring approximately 6 × 5 metres. During the reconstruction of house no. 29 carried out around 1980, the stone-and-clay core of one of the original ghetto cottages was discovered, confirming the entry in the local chronicle that the houses were "clay-built" – meaning a combination of stone and large unfired clay bricks. The ghetto was built in a part of the village on unwelcoming, marshy land (the very name "Slatina" means boggy ground), where there was at that time still a spring with a high magnesium content, possibly of medicinal value.
The role of Jews in the life of Slatina
The main reason Kunáš of Machovic settled Jews in Slatina was economic – for his own benefit. Yet the Jewish element gave the village a particular character. Jewish balls were held here, mainly at the inn of Hasterlik the Jew. Slatina had a second, manorial inn as well. On the Saturday Sabbath the village came alive with dozens of Jews from the entire surrounding area in their characteristic black caftans, hats and long beards. The funeral processions passing through the village on their way to the cemetery on Hradce were also an interesting sight.
Despite the two ethnic groups living side by side, the local inhabitants and the Jews lived in harmony and peace. Poor villagers helped the Jews in their trade as cattle drivers to surrounding markets, even as far as Prague and Bavaria. Porters, messengers, farmers offered their wagons, livestock and grain. It can therefore be said that in this respect the period of Slatina's Jewish flourishing was significant for the village as a whole.
Emigration and dissolution (1850–1917)
As the number of Jews dwindled, the costly prayer house emptied, teaching in the "shul" ceased, and the rising Jewish generation sought their livelihoods in the towns and emigrated to America. The devout Mojse Hasterlik, wishing to save at least the synagogue for a further decade, deposited 2,000 gulden with the administrator of the religious community in Horažďovice in 1898, so that it would not be sold and so that the interest on the deposit could be used to carry out repairs.
The creation of a new Jewish community in 1868 in Lažany Enisovy weakened the Slatina community, and emigration to America followed: in 1894 alone, 134 people departed, and in total nearly 250 from Slatina alone. After 1850, the emigration of Slatina's Jews was primarily to the United States, but also to the Balkans (Bosnia and Herzegovina). From a historical perspective, the ghetto is the most interesting feature, of which only the houses marked in the 1837 plan – nos. 19, 29 and 31 – survive to the present day, and even these have been considerably altered (they now serve recreational purposes).
On 20 September 1917, the last Jew, Karel Sabath, left Slatina and moved to Kasejovice. That same year, merchant and music teacher Karel Volmut bought the synagogue for 10,800 CZK. Enterprisingly, he converted the "shul" into a shop and the prayer hall into a barn. After the Second World War he moved away and the abandoned building served various purposes for the village and the newly established agricultural cooperative. When the cooperative then used the synagogue to store chemical fertilisers, it seemed its fate was sealed. Fortunately, after a merger of cooperatives the then owner, JZD Svéradice, sold it, and the new owners restored it to its present form.
Saving the cemetery – ICOMOS
As part of documentary research for ICOMOS (the International Council on Monuments and Sites – a non-governmental organisation of UNESCO) based in Paris, Rivka and Ben Zio Dorfman from the Israeli branch of ICOMOS visited Slatina. The outcome of their visit was a recommendation that the Jewish cemetery should be saved in the same way, with the help of organisations, institutions and sponsors, as a unique complex of rural Jewish settlement – while there is still time.
Compiled using materials by Josef Smitka. Note: Karel Sabath was a member of the Sabath family – see also Adolf Joachim Sabath.