Police investigate 'anti-Semitic' graffiti

Police are investigating the origins of potentially anti-Semitic graffiti etched on the walls of Bethlehem Chapel in Old Town.

A reader alerted The Prague Post to the incident, in which the phrases "story about your shoes" and "how old are your shoes" were written in English on the walls of the 620-year-old chapel.

While the intended meaning of the slogans is not known, they are a likely reference to the piles of victims' shoes amassed by the Nazis at Auschwitz during the Holocaust, based on similar slogans previously displayed by ultra-nationalists at sports games elsewhere in Europe.

"Some people marked their poor existence by writing this completely ugly and stupid message," Ana Maria Pop, who first reported the vandalism, told The Prague Post. "It's not even graffiti or art, as some may call it, or even a clever message. It's just an ugly scratch on this beautiful old chapel, which is the symbol of Bethlehem Square."

Laying the blame on visitors as the likely perpetrators, Pop added, "The tourist season has just started, and already they are destroying historical monuments that hundreds of people come to visit every day."

Tomáš Kraus, secretary of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic, said he believed anti-Semitism was "a very marginal phenomenon" here, but that this incident deserved thorough investigation by police.

"Generally, these kinds of events are quite rare in this country. Fortunately for us, we are perhaps the only country in Europe that does not have a serious issue with this," he said.

Kraus noted that while extremism was undoubtedly a problem, "the Czech neo-Nazi scene has a completely different target" - the Roma community. He agreed with Pop, however, that the graffiti being in English suggested it was not the work of a local.

Nonetheless, Kraus said the Czech Republic has a low standard of general education about the Holocaust, and more emphasis needs to be placed on this issue in schools as people "only have superficial information about what happened."

Prague police told The Prague Post the vandalism had not previously been reported to them, but they had now forwarded details of the incident to officers investigating extremist crimes.

Jana Rösslerová, a spokeswoman for the force, said police "regularly send out patrols into the city center" to counteract potential acts of vandalism.

"They protect the safety of citizens and their property, as well as prevent criminal activities," Rösslerová said, adding that if perpetrators are caught in the act of vandalism, they are always prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Radana Sušiolová of the Jewish Museum of Prague said the institute was studying a photograph of the graffiti, but did not issue a formal response to the incident as of press time.

Dating from the 14th century, Bethlehem Chapel is most famous for its connection with Jan Hus and is considered one of the birthplaces of the Protestant reformation in the Czech lands. In the 1780s, Emperor Joseph II converted it into an apartment building.

In the 1950s, the communists reconverted the building into a chapel, retaining original medieval elements, including most of the exterior wall and part of the pulpit. Parts of Hus' original writings can also be seen inside the chapel.

In spite of the tone of the graffiti, the building has never had any connection with Judaism in its 620-year history. It is suspected that the vandals mistakenly tagged the building because of its name and location, which refer to the town of Bethlehem, located in present-day West Bank.

Slogans similar to the ones on the chapel wall have been connected to right-wing soccer hooligans from the region. The campaign group Football Against Racism in Europe (FARE) says "problems of racism and anti-Semitism in particular" are a common sight at stadiums in Eastern Europe "to an extent no longer encountered in Western states."

FARE is currently working in Poland and Ukraine to prevent racism by neo-Nazi groups from being a feature of next year's Euro 2012 soccer championship finals, co-hosted by the two countries.

Ultra-nationalists previously used sporting events as a platform for their extremist agenda in the United Kingdom and in Continental Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, but the display of extremist banners at games has all but disappeared since anti-racism efforts were stepped up in these countries during the 1990s.

- Klára Jiřičná contributed to this report.

Bill Lehane can be reached at
blehane@praguepost.com