Jewish History

Peter Hallama (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris)

This lecture will reconsider the growing interest in Jewish culture, religion, and history in the last decade of State Socialism in Czechoslovakia. It will focus on three aspects: generational conflicts within the Jewish community and the younger generation’s questioning of their families’ pasts and religiousness; the dissident appropriations of Jewish history and culture; and the beginning of nostalgia for “Mitteleuropa”, idealizing its cultural, national, and religious heterogeneity as opposed to the homogenizing tendencies of the Communist régime. One of the starting points of the analysis is the first meeting of the so-called « Terezín children » in September 1986 (see photo, taken from the film Terezín Diary).