The Jewish Ghetto as History

...Boskovice's Jewish quarter is one of the most extensive ghettos extant in Central Europe...

...A sign at the entrance reads, "Indian Territory.' Another notes the kilometers to various spots in the American West—most of them spelled incorrectly...

...I was not surprised, therefore, by two posters I found on display in the Boskovice tourist office...

...Nearly 80,000 Czech Jews were killed during the Holocaust...

...The entire ghetto seemed dead...

...I had lunch with him in Lomnice, a village whose synagogue has been restored and will house a historical exhibit...

...A handbill shows a seductive Indian maiden looking over her shoulder...

...I call it Jewish archeology," says Arno Parik of the Jewish Museum in Prague, who has been a consultant on many of these projects...

...An association was set up by the Town Council in the early 1990s to oversee the restoration of the Jewish quarter...

...By the mid-19th century they made up more than a third of the population...

...Jews lived here as far back as the 14th century...

...In 1990 the abandoned 17th-century synagogue was heavily scaffolded, but no repair work was in progress...

...This is privately run, no...

...Now they feel the people need to know about this...

...Far more than the crooked streets and the mysterious fragments of frescoes in the synagogues, the restaurants evoke a past that is idealized and imaginary...

...over 150 Jewish communities were wiped out...

...A graceful oval, it was lined with holdovers from the recent past: dingy shops whose functional wares were haphazardly displayed in dusty showcase windows...

...The Jewish ghetto too has changed, thanks to a municipal development project aimed at revitalizing the district and reclaiming local Jewish history...

...It is gone—replaced, as far as I can tell, by an electronics store...

...Maybe in five years the trend will be over...

...Local Jews serve as advisers, but the inspiration and planning come from non-Jews...

...Since the collapse of Communism, Klenovsky, who works closely with the Jews of Brno, has published booklets on the Jewish history of half a dozen or more Moravian towns...

...The other advertises a rodeo at a place called "Wild West City: Boskovice's Western Town...

...Transformed into an upscale establishment, it caters today to business travelers...

...One is for a jazz festival whose proceeds are to go toward renovation of the Jewish quarter...

...The valuable Jewish input into local culture faded away, and people forgot it...

...Just like many other decaying historical monuments, the nearly empty quarter, the abandoned synagogue and the neglected Jewish cemetery turned into a true reflection of our society...

...Its decorations include antique bottles, old pictures of the ghetto, and a poster for the 1995 European Maccabee Games in Amsterdam...

...Visitors begin their tour by watching multilingual videos recounting the community's history...

...I asked the proprietor, or rather declared, after drinking the excellent coffee...

...The synagogue is also nearly restored and will soon be open to the public...

...With an ironic twinge of nostalgia, I look for the greasy-spoon buffet where I had breakfast in 1990...

...It features photographs of people dressed up like American Indians riding horses, with corrals, rickety wooden structures and even tepees in the background...

...The Communists had been ousted less than a year before, and this town in the wooded hills north of Brno, the capital of Moravia, was still waking up to the fact...

...It was the one private business on the oval...

...To be sure, I have seen Indian dolls wearing beaded costumes for sale in the Denver train station that reminded me of the "Jewish" puppets and figures I have photographed in Prague, Krakow and Venice...

...Not many locals were out and about either...

...The clientele are a mix of intellectuals and students: lots of long hair, cigarettes, pierced noses and eyebrows...

...A lot of these revived Jewish quarters have restaurants in them that serve Jewish-sounding dishes or have a Jewish-style name," Klenovsky explained...

...I found Wild West City on my map, at the edge of Boskovice, and stopped there on my way out of town...

...It is a theme park set up in an old quarry that resembles a stage set from a John Ford movie, replete with a flimsy wooden saloon and general store...

...Similar efforts are under way in other parts of the country...

...In the guest book I found the entries not only of many Czech school groups but of people from Israel, Germany and the Netherlands...

...Seven years later, I scarcely recognize the town...

...The only sound is that of hoofbeats, as a costumed employee rides a horse round and round the repro corral...

...Like Boscovice, though, a number of nearby towns and villages—Trebic, Velke, Mezerici, Lomnice—are revitalizing their Jewish quarters...

...A former residence was converted into a small Jewish museum in 1994...

...For 50 years people couldn't speak about Jews and Jewish history,' explains Jaroslav Klenovsky, a non-Jewish architect and local historian from Brno who was one of the few people, during the Communist era, to seek out and document Moravian Jewish sites and traditions...

...Next door, indeed, is the Herman Ungar Teahouse, where you can sip exotic infusions and fresh-brewed coffee, buy New Age books and listen to music that, as one visitor ventured, suggests a Tibetan dirge accompanied by a chorus of tree frogs...

...One street retains the arched gate that in an earlier era closed the district off from the rest of the town...

...greasy-spoon buffets offering sausages, sour bread, beer from the tap, and dishwater coffee...

...The restaurant on the leafy ghetto square had three specialties on the menu: Jewish Pocket, Jacob's Fish and Rabbi's Hat—a decidedly nonkosher dish of chicken with ham and cheese...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber, apast NL contributor, is working on a book about Jewish culture without the Jews in Europe...

...He is the leading consultant on establishing new museums and reconstructing Jewish quarters...

...At present fewer than a dozen function formally in the CzechRepublic—where only about 3,500 Jews live, half of them in Prague...

...Fifty-four of them are under municipal protection—part of a historic district...

...Only after eating breakfast in one of those dismal places did I come across a tiny cafe, spotlessly clean, serving fancy cakes and real Italian espresso and selling decorous souvenirs made from dried flowers...

...Oh yes," he nodded...

...It's off-season...

...Theirs is a sort of literary image of what is Jewish...

...I seemed to be the only foreign visitor that brilliant October day...

...Such was the boom in this town of 10,000 that acouple of years ago an Englishman, Andrew Shand, produced a booklet called "A Pub Crawl of Boskovice," detailing 31 local hot spots...

...A plaque on the wall of one house, affixed in 1993, marks the birthplace of the rum-of-the-century Jewish author and playwright Hermann Ungar...

...Many ghetto buildings have been cleaned, painted and patched...

...Some people compare Europe's current interest in Jewish culture with the United States' interest in Native American culture...

...They are dark-paneled, homey and decorated with antiques or— as at the Rachel in Trebic—Hebrew lettering...

...The place is deserted...

...That was true as well of the main market...

...I am barely able to distinguish the cafe, now expanded into a much larger pastry shop, amid the scores of new restaurants, snack bars, banks, and other enterprises that make the market bustle...

...He pauses, then adds: "It's also fashionable...

...A few steps away, in the heart of the ghetto, I discovered a "Makkabi" restaurant—dark, smoky, with a low, barrelvaulted ceiling...

...The f leabag hotel where, on that first trip, I passed an uneasy night listening to drunken men stumbling up and down the corridor, is unrecognizable...

...During the Communist years of 'elaborate plans and bright tomorrows,' the quarter became dilapidated and depopulated," reads a brochure detailing the project...

...There is an exhibit of ritual objects, and a memorial listing the more than 400 Jews from the Boskovice area who were killed in the Holocaust...

...For most of the morning I wandered through the picturesque but run-down market and poked around the crooked lanes of the decrepit former Jewish quarter...