Welcome to the official website of the Jewish cultural heritage in Slatina

For already more than 1000 years Jews are cocreating the society picture.

Based on extant written materiále the first Jewish merchants were comming to Czech lands since 10th century via business roads from the south acroos the Alps and from the east across the Balkane peninsula. The merchant caravanas were heading mainly to social and business centers like city of Brno, Olomouc, Znojmo or Prague. This was the first step of settling down of the jewish community in czech lands.

However same as elsewhere in Europe the foreigners were considered to be collusion for local inhabitans in the economic spere. Therefore the coexistence of these two communities were not without conflicts. The czech guilds felt endangered by the jewish competition and were trying to get rid of them with the help of various regulations. Jews were forced to claim for safety at monarchs or nobles but that was finacialy very difficult. In consequence the jewish inhabitans were in cul de sac with no way out. Jews voluntarily or from compulsion were separated to ghettos. But even those places did not offer enough safety (pogroms). With effort to have the basic safety Jews were trying to get under the protective wings of authorities which could offer them at least partial economic and social guarantees. After the effort of most towns and cities to move Jews behind their borders there was a period of jewish settlement in small towns and villages.

Thousands of years of present of cultural distinctive jewish community left behind many marks. There where ghettos, synagogues, cemeteries, books and manuscripts, objects of art and many other valuable reliques. Many of these reliques became extinct. They were purposely destroyed, liquidated during the pogroms or after the expulsion of jewish inhabitans from cities and towns, villages or from the whole country. The abandoned temples, houses and cemeteries owned by rural jewish communities, depopulated by the end of 19th century were taken into parts for construction materiál, stolen. The Nazis were demolishing jewish objects and stealing jewish property in large. The following 40 years of struggling under communist regime wreak havoc. Still in the half of 19th century there was about 1921 places with bigger or smaller jewish settlement. About hundred years later there were no more significant signs of jewish settlement on 325 places.

Thanks to dense network of jewish communities in czech countries there had been preserved a lot.

At the end of 20th century there were about 350 jewish cemeteries, 313 synagogues and 77 older jewish habitations in Bohemia and Moravia.

One of these places which history is closely associated with jewish community is small village in southwest Bohemia - Slatina by Horažďovice.