By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — The bearded man in the middle, front row was the rabbi. He was renowned and admired for his wisdom, spirituality, and the judiciousness he applied—particularly in view of the fact that Jews were not considered a part of the state society in the pre-Nazi world of Jasina, Czechoslovakia in the 1930s.
So the rabbi in this little town, situated beneath the snow-topped Carpathian Mountains, was like almost every rabbi who worked and taught in between the pogroms of the early 20th century and the lethal spread of the Nazi toxin at about the time this rare photograph was taken. The rabbi was effectively the local Jewish mayor, the adjudicator, the facilitator of marriages, and the person who supervised the dietary and hygiene laws. He was the municipal ombudsman, the divorce mediator, the circumcision authority, and the ambassador (often at personal risk) to the surrounding gentile community.
The muscular man sitting to the rabbi’s left was evidently the synagogue president. He was a furrier, perhaps—or maybe the owner of the local general goods store that serviced both the Jews (about 25% of the local population) and the gentiles in need of everything from corn meal to shoes to a set of wooden skates or skis for the winter sports enjoyed in the area.
The children and grandchildren of these Jewish men of Jasina rarely took part in the winter festivities. They were a) not welcome and b) unable to partake in same because they spent late afternoons in Hebrew School (usually knows as “cheyder”—“the room”) and were consigned to home or the synagogue on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, while the non-Jewish kids played in the snow.
The Jewish pupils themselves routinely fended off fists, rocks, or just savage beatings en route to and from the local public school because anti-Semitism fell down from the mountains as readily as the cold brooks and streams that drained from the springtime melting snow. By the mid-1930s, with Nazi racial edicts sealed into law via the Nuremberg Laws, the Jewish school children were expelled from school at any rate; they were relegated to woodwork or stone-cutting trade schools and being countenanced by their neighbors as profitable inducements for the coming Nazi genocide.
It is doubtful that any of the men in this photograph, rabbi, scholars, attorneys, physicians, teachers, tradesmen, and engineers were still alive within five to eight years of the image. They were systemically gunned down by the traveling, machine-gun toting, mass-murdering German killing squads known as the Einsatzgruppen, perhaps gassed at Auschwitz, starved at Dachau, or worked to death in the quarries of the Mauthausen concentration complex.
There is no record that a single one of these Jewish community leaders, educated, upstanding, tax-paying, a number of them decorated veterans of World War I, had ever been associated with any form of criminality, intrigue, or activities that biologically or socially threatened the well-being of the various nations that had administered Jasina, from Austria-Hungary to Czechoslovakia to Germany to Russia.
They were just Jewish men, and their wives and children lived peaceful lives dedicated to Torah, education, charity, and good works. They disappeared from this earth and were begrudged their very existence by the greatest collaborative and genocidal catastrophe ever known to humankind.
Take a moment, look at their faces, and ask yourself what you are doing to make sure it never happens again to any person or any people.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in Encinitas, California. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com