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August 29th, 2008

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Time to ask questions

What's the 'acceptable degree of collaboration' with the StB?
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April 25th, 2007 issue

By Tomáš Jelinek

In October 1963, the Swiss newspaper Neuer Zuercher Zeitung started an international public discussion about responsibility of official Jewish leaders for the destruction of European Jews. This issue was triggered by the Eichmann trial in Israel. Hannah Arendt, who was sent to Jerusalem that year to cover the story for The New Yorker, came to the extreme conclusion that all official Jewish leaders contributed to the efficiency of Nazi killing and presented her opinion in the Swiss newspaper.

So, without the official Jewish infrastructure there, there would have been fewer Jews killed during the Holocaust, Arendt concluded. Her views are reflected also in her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which was published in Czech in 1995. Eighteen years after the Holocaust, Jewish intellectuals were able to publicly open the question of Judenrat “collaboration” with the Nazi regime. The answers to that question are still evolving on the side of historians, and many new generations of Jews to come will be looking for their own response.

Eighteen years after the Velvet Revolution is the right time to ask questions about the “collaboration” of Jewish officials with the communist regime and its State Police (StB). The moral dilemmas are quite similar to those of the Nazi dictatorship, while the steps of each regime’s final solution differed. While the Nazis wanted total physical destruction, the communists wanted moral deterioration, which would result in assimilation. According to the communist ideology, the Jewish tradition was seducing Jewish workers away from the importance of the class struggle. When communist countries stopped supporting Israel, the anti-Jewish agenda was extended to the peril of Zionists.

Under communism

There were two main channels for controlling Jewish life in communist Czechoslovakia. In this society, where all important economic and political decisions were made by the central authorities, it is not surprising that religious associations fell under the direct supervision of the Office of Religious Affairs, later taken over by the Interior Ministry. This administration had the final say over all important issues in the Jewish community: who could be a rabbi or a cantor, whether young Jews were allowed to accept invitations to visit foreign communities, etc. This official channel aside, there was a secret one under the wing of the StB. Before 1989, there was even a special StB section dealing just with non-Catholic religious organizations, under which the Jewish community was also closely watched.

StB archives, which have been relatively accessible to the public since 2002, give a much more detailed testimony about Jewish life in communist Czechoslovakia than do the archives of Jewish communities, which are, unfortunately, more or less nonexistent. The archives are a testament to individual courage but also individual weaknesses and failures. Archives contain documents relating to Jewish organizations abolished by the communists during the 1948–54 period. There are also parts of different StB operational files on international Jewish organizations, Jewish communities and their members. They provide, for example, information about extensive investigations of humanitarian assistance to needy Jews provided by the American Joint Distribution Committee in the second half of the 1950s. Many members of Czechoslovak Jewish religious communities were arrested for being involved in this activity. One of them even died in jail.

The StB monitored the opinions of the Jewish community about different Arab-Israeli military conflicts. It demanded information about Jewish foreigners visiting Jewish religious communities. It went even so far as to organize Operation Pavouk (spider) to register in its files all the Czechoslovak Zionists (that is, Jews). For all that activity, the StB needed collaborators from inside the Jewish community. If someone took an official position in the Jewish Religious Community, it was almost certain that he or she would be contacted by the StB to provide some information. It was the test of his or her character how far this relationship would go. Some people were blackmailed to become agents, but some even used it as an opportunity to hurt opponents. One official even sold all the tombstones from the Jewish cemetery in Lovosice, where my great-grandparents were buried. There were also those who courageously refused to cooperate, and often they had to pay for this.

The historical concept of the Jewish Religious Community was abused by the Nazi and communist dictatorships. The question of collaboration with those regimes challenges the centralized concept of Jewish life in the Czech Republic. It opens moral dilemmas that have not yet been properly discussed.

Not just about past

Unfortunately, the issue of an “acceptable degree of collaboration” is not a hypothetical question for historical discussion. Despite the fact that the Jewish community made its decision in the 1990s on the process for dealing with its representatives who were listed as StB agents (they had to clear their names in court or they could not hold certain positions), the executive director of the Federation of Jewish Communities, an umbrella organization for all Jewish religious communities and other Jewish organizations, is an officially listed StB agent on the Web site of the Interior Ministry.

The person who represents Czech Jews before the Czech government and has represented them in many international Jewish organizations for the past 17 years (for example, the European Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee) collaborated with the StB for about 10 years. He provided the StB with information on members of the Jewish Community. His reports were used for StB Operation Rada, targeting officials and members within the Jewish community. As part of the StB’s anti-Zionist activities, he reported on “Zionist youth.” The StB even planned for him to become more involved in official Jewish structures and report on Jews abroad. It is a paradox that this finally happened after the Velvet Revolution, almost at the same time as the former chief rabbi resigned from his office after publicly admitting his collaboration with the StB.

Czech Jews have this issue to address. They should decide about the “acceptable degree of collaboration” and find out if there is any reason why they should be domestically and internationally represented by a person who was an StB “anti-Zionist” agent.

— The author was chairman of the Prague Jewish Community from 2001 to 2005, worked for Václav Havel as an economic adviser and is now director of public affairs for Donath-Burson-Marsteller.

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