Prague Marom seminar trip report
Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manOver the weekend of 22-25 viiber I was in Prague for a Marom Olami seminar on "Redemption and renewal towards the High Holydays", with emphasis on music.
The seminar was the follow-up to the one I went to in Berlin in May. Like then, I went out a day early, and came back a day late, both because the flights were more convenient for me that way, and also in order to be able to see the city.
One thing I hadn't realised was Prague's reputation as a destination for Brits going for rowdy stag parties. Possibly I've given myself a reputation at work by telling people I was going there. :o) (Probably not, though.)
Prague is a beautiful city, and rich in lots of history I knew little about: I had no idea beforehand, for example, that Prostestants - followers of Jan Hus - were fighting Catholics there a hundred years before Martin Luther. Though having read Neal Stephenson's novel Quicksilver, I was aware of the terrible human toll that the Thirty Years War took on the area.
I spent Thursday wandering through the city centre, and most of the afternoon in the castle - in the gardens of which, a couple of hundred yards from where the defenestration that launched the Thirty Years War took place, I saw a red squirrel for the first time in my life.
In the museum of historical weaponry above Golden Lane in the castle, I was astonished to hear music playing, with mediaeval-sounding instrumentation, and lyrics that were not Hebrew (goodness knows what they were; they didn't sound like Latin either) to the tune of the Sephardi melody for the Sabbath table hymn צור משלו. Inquiring in the shop, I learned the song was from the CD Ecce Krless of mediaeval European music. I wonder whether Krless took the tune from the זמר or whether the זמר was a contemporary tune, whether secular or Christian tune, filked. Annoyingly, the track in question is not one of the MP3s provided at the abovelinked site, so I have not yet been able to identify which song it was, and have not yet resolved this mystery.
On the Charles Bridge connecting the Old Town to Hradčany (the castle district), there's a crucifix decorated with "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of Hosts", in large, golden, Hebrew letters. The story goes that a Jew, accused of defaming Jesus, was forced to add that to the crucifix as punishment, and to humiliate the Jews - though Sabina later informed us that the charges were trumped up, the authorities using antisemitism to unite the recently forcibly re-Catholicised country. (That said, Bohemia escaped fairly lightly compared to other European countries as regards persecution of the Jews down through the ages.) Anyhow, when I got to look at this statute, the ו and half the final ה of the Tetragrammaton were missing. Whilst I'm certain Chabad would not have been responsible for this disfigurement, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they have been lobbying the municipal authorities to argue against repairing it.
Speaking of the river (Vltava or Moldau), it was, of course, the same folk melody that Bedřich Smetana used for his symphonic poem "Vltava" in his cycle Má Vlast (My Country) that would later be adopted for the Zionist anthem (now Israeli national anthem) Hatikva. Another example of the fundamental interconnectedness of things, with even the non-seminar parts of the weekend turfing up connections to Jewish melodies. Dirk Gently would be proud.
This trip was my first in a country where they spoke a Slavic language. (Indeed, it was odd to be in a place where, seeing old inscriptions in the vernacular and Latin, it was the Latin I was looking for to understand them.) Consequently, there was much opportunity for linguistics geeking. For example, from knowing that some Slavic languages possess the sound /h/ where others have /g/, and observing that Czech falls into the former camp, and also knowing (from A Clockwork Orange) that "bog" is Russian for "god", I was able to work out, when discussing Terry Pratchett with Zlatka, which of a list of his books was Small Gods (Malí Bohové).
A little surprise, discovering Václav is the same name as Wenceslas. (In the mosaic on the outside of St Vitus' Cathedral, there's an intermediate form: Wěceslaus [not sure about the accent on the 'e'].)
Anyhow, on to the seminar, which kicked off on Thursday evening. There were considerably fewer people than at the Berlin one: myself and Assael (the Masorti shaliach) from the UK, three people from Germany and two from Hungary, and the rest were Prague residents - including both a bunch of American students studying a semester there at least partly unknown to the local Marom, and a girl and her mother who turned up having seen the seminar advertised on the Internet.
For accommodation for the seminar, we were put up in an apartment undergoing renovation in Křižikova Street - bonus points for being able to pronounce the name of the place you were staying in. :o) Actually, wandering around in the vicinity trying to find the place, and receiving shakes of the head to "mluvíte Anglicky?", being able to follow it up with "Français? עברית?" gave me a pleasing feel of at least not coming across as a completely monoglot Brit.
After icebreaking activities on the Thursday, the seminar got going with a viewing of the Israeli film אושפיזין (Ushpizin) [IMDB review], about a בעל תשובה [baal teshuva, Jewish equivalent of born-again Christian] who gets an unexpected guest over the festival of סוכות: a friend from his pre-religious days on the run after skipping parole. I remember reading about this in the JC when it first came out: despite the main leads being husband and wife in reality as well as on screen, and despite the fact they never once came into physical contact on screen, they were censured by the Charedi community for making the film nonetheless. <rolls eyes> Still, not everybody was against it, and the Charedi extras on the film were all real-life Charedim. And the film does a good job of portraying the difficulties generated by the clash of cultures, without resorting to the usual stereotypes.
Friday got going with שחרית (morning service). In Berlin I'd skipped that, preferring to get the extra time asleep, and only discovered on the last day it had involved Assael playing guitar. Now, I find singing to be an excellent way of generating spirituality, especially for someone such as myself who has difficulty finding it in the liturgy alone; so this time I made the effort to drag myself out of bed. The service wasn't by any means a full one (and טלית and תפילין were not necessary, though I'd brought mine); I don't know if it was in Berlin or not.
Afterwards we had a session on the disengagement from Gaza, including role-playing arguments from a viewpoint in which I found it very difficult to come up with any arguments pro-disengagement at all. Amusingly, I later got into a (friendly) argument with someone about the disengagement, with me wearing an orange waistcoat but sounding off pro-disengagement, and the other party wearing blue but sounding off anti-disengagement.
Lunch was at an Arabic restaurant called Dahab. (My mother got excited about this when I told her about it: turns out she'd eaten there too!) I wish I'd realised they served sahlab when I was ordering; I haven't had it in ten years - since, indeed, I visited the original Dahab in the Sinai, when I used to breakfast upon it. I must look into getting it or making it in the UK. Yummy!
In the afternoon, Sabina took us on a short walking tour of Prague. Due to a lapse in communication, this did not end up covering Jewish Prague, but that wasn't so bad, as I still had Sunday to do that; and I learned quite a bit I hadn't picked up from my wandering around on Thursday. Even some of the Prague residents said they learned things they hadn't known about their city!
קבלת שבת [the Sabbath inauguration service] was with the Masorti community
in the Jewish community centre. The rabbi there, Rabbi Hoffberg, is American;
though he seems nice, I was not very whelmed on learning that four years after
coming there, he still can't speak Czech. I missed both on Friday night and
Shabbos morning the nice Carlebach and other
tunes I was used to, but you can't have everything. (As ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
rysmiel
says, where would you put it?)
After the service, we headed downstairs for a meal in their refectory. Several other meals were going on there as well, including a שבע ברוכות [festive meal during the week after a wedding], with the country's Chief Rabbi in attendance. The food was fairly basic (okay, Adellaide, I admit it!), but there was lots of nice singing after the meal.
On Shabbos morning we davened in the cellar at the Bejt Simcha, after stopping to poke our noses in at the Jubilee, a.k.a. Jerusalem Street, shul [illustrated right], on the way. The Masorti community does not normally have a Shabbos morning service, and I was surprised when they asked there and then for someone to read the הפטרה. After waiting a few seconds for anyone else to volunteer, I stuck my hand up. It's the first time I've done הפטרה completely sight unseen. I was pleased with myself both for not mixing up intermedial with terminal מרכא/תפחא (as they're sung differently), and also for catching myself on the point of reading the כתיב where the קרי did not follow it (as I was using the Hertz חומש, with the כתיב in the main text and the קרי variants footnoted).
Later that day, there followed a סעודה שלישית [third festive meal], and shiur on the melodies (and other sounds: what looks like a שופר and makes a sound, but isn't one?) of the High Holydays, given by Oren, at the rabbi's place, in which I amused the Americans by referring to ornamentation in the music as "twiddles".
The block where the rabbi lived had a paternoster in it; I'd never seen one before. Though it would make a convenient Shabbos lift, it was out of service since a woman had stepped out into the gearing mechanism not long beforehand. Apparently they're illegal in the EU now, but the Czech Republic has been given special dispensation for the next few years until they can all be phased out.
I was also... amused to see this in the shopping mall that the rabbi has to pass through to reach his flat:
Though that's not the only odd statue there; there's also this unusual take on the statue in Wenceslas Square of St Wencenslas ("who though he looked 4th really came first") astride his horse:
And on the subject of the bizarre: Quote of the weekend, from a couple of American tourists presumably unaware I understood English: "Stand still on the other side of this man and let's get the dog in the bag before anybody sees it."
After הבדלה [ritual to let the Sabbath out], we went out to a bar for the evening. I didn't have any alcohol... but by that time had already been talked twice in twenty-four hours into accepting a shot of vodka. Whatever next?
So, on to Sunday and שחרית, following which off to the Jewish Liberal Union for a session by Milon and Janna on the High Holyday melodies of the Modzitzer Chassidim (ניגונים available at this site, if anyone's interested), and of Shlomo Carlebach. At one point we were learning a Modzitzer ניגון for כי אנו עמיך recorded in 1927... and at the next Forgotten-His-Name (sorry) was searching for a USB cable to plug his iPod into Petra's laptop to share a ניגון he had brought with him with the rest of us. I noticed people tended to shut their eyes when listening to Nechama Carlebach's singing, and took advantage of the opportunity to get lots of photos of people looking chilled out. :o))
The final seminar activity was תשליך (Tashlich). Traditionally on the second day of ראש השנה (Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year) one casts one's sins symbolically into flowing water. In our case, because it wasn't יום טוב, we were able to write them down on pieces of paper, which we then folded into paper boats, and trundled down to the Vltava to set them adrift. Relieving yourself of your sins was never such fun before (and probably shouldn't be, but hey)!
After the seminar ended, I used that afternoon (turning down an invitation to accompany Hanna to a Jewish wedding - sorry, Hanna; I hope you had a good time) to have a look around Josefov, the Jewish quarter of Prague. Prague is famous as the residence of the Biblical commentator Judah Leib ben Bezalel, known to Jews as the Maharal of Prague, and to Gentiles as Rabbi Löw, the man famed as the creator of the Golem.
It was good that I'd already learned so much of the secular history of Bohemia on Thursday, as that way I could interrelate the Jewish history with the secular. For example, learning that Rudolf II was a friend of the Jews made sense knowing that he was an enlightened man who encouraged the development of the arts and sciences.
Little remains of the historical buildings of the Jewish quarter today: most of it was demolished in slum clearance at the turn of the last century, to be replaced with stylish Parisian buildings along Paris Street. However, most of the synagogues remain, along with the Jewish Town Hall, including the Altneuschul, the oldest operating synagogue in Europe (if you disregard the fact it's currently shut due to intercommunal bickering). Most of these synagogues have now been turned into sites of the Prague Jewish Museum. Prague has a good collection of Judaica, as the Nazis decided to create there a museum of the Jewish race, to record what it had been after they had wiped it out, and gathered Judaica there from across Czechoslovakia.
For some reason, all the manuscripts on display in these museums were all facsimiles. I could understand this for the paper manuscripts, which would require a controlled environment to prevent further deterioration, but was somewhat surprised this was the case for the parchment ones too. I was also surprised to see a manuscript סידור in one of the museums dating from the seventeenth or eighteenth century: to think that people were still handwriting books by that time!
An interesting tidbit: Due to the fact that in the mediaeval period the Jews were all literate in Hebrew, and writing their vernaculars in the Hebrew alphabet, whereas literate Gentiles tended to write in Latin, there are many Czech words which are recorded in the Hebrew alphabet before the Latin. It's like a more extreme version of the French words first attested in Rashi's eleventh-century Bible commentaries.
It always strikes me as slightly strange to see cultures so different to our own - particularly the historical Bohemia reflected in the museums rather than today's cosmopolitan Prague - and yet see the religion reflected in their סידורים entirely familiar and not different at all. Though I suppose it might not have seemed so familiar had I been able to participate in it rather than simply observing the liturgy (q.v., frex, my above comment about missing the tunes I was used to).
The Pinkas Synagogue has been turned into a Holocaust memorial. The walls are covered, from floor to ceiling, with a list of the Czechoslovak Jews who perished in the Holocaust. Like the children's memorial in Yad Vashem, the effect is to turn the meaningless number of victims into a much more meaningful enumeration of real people. The sheer number is such that the mind can't help shying away from it.
These lists of names were damaged in the recent floods in Prague, which reached a level of around a metre in the Pinkas Synagogue, and have had to be restored since. But apparently flooding of the Vltava is not entirely uncommon, if not normally to that degree; I suspect it's only a matter of time - a few decades - until they have to do the whole thing all over again.
Upstairs in the synagogue is a moving display of pictures made by children in the Terezín concentration camp, along with birth and death dates for each artist - or, occasionally, "survived".
Entry to the synagogue is via a turnstile; exit is via the old Jewish
cemetery. However, as a cohen (priest), I can't enter cemeteries, so
had to squeeze back through the turnstile in the wrong direction, adding an
extraneous turn to it (and recorded visitor numbers?) to get out. If compilerbitch or doseybat is reading this, they may be
interested to know that the ground level in the cemetery is fully fifteen feet
above that in the surrounding area! They ran out of room so badly that they
had to keep bringing in earth from outside in order to be able to bury
people.
The Spanish Synagogue is more recent than the others; it is on the site of an old shul demolished a century ago and replaced with one decorated in Moorish/Byzantine style, hence the name (there's no Sephardi connection). The result is really quite mindblowingly sumptuous. It doesn't look like a synagogue at all; it looks like it should be a mosque in an core holy site of Islam! The Jubilee Synagogue, too, is a "cathedral shul". Personally, I find such buildings impersonal. I like my places of worship cozy, and prefer small and intimate over large and echoing. Interesting, then, to contrast the Spanish Synagogue with the small brick-lined cellar, its vaulted ceiling hand-painted with Biblical quotations, of the Bejt Simcha.
The Spanish Synagogue was a Reform shul; tucked away on the first floor was a pipe organ. In one of the museum cabinets there was a Reform סדור; I was amused to see the page it was open at was לכה דודי: part of the Reform liturgy, it is true, but full of sentiments I would not associate with Reform thinking, such as longing for the Messiah, or "שמור וזכור בדבור אחד" (the traditional reconciling of the discrepancy between "Observe the Sabbath day" and "Remember the Sabbath day" in the two Pentateuchal accounts of the Ten Commandments, as being due to G-d having pronounced both variants in the same utterance). I was also surprised to see the two מנורות [menorahs, candelabra] either side of the Bimah not having the candle holders all at the same level, thus rendering them פסול (unsuitable for use) on Chanukah.
My mother had told me I had to go to a recital whilst I was in Prague, so after the buildings of the Jewish quarter had shut for the day, I bought myself a ticket to a concert in the Spanish Synagogue - and got 40% off simply for blanching at the price! (*boggle*) I told myself Judaism doesn't have the concept of consecrated buildings in the same way that Christianity did; you can make a building into a shul by putting a ספר תורה [Torah scroll] into it, and turn it back into a non-shul merely by removing it. Moreover, classical music did not strike me as a disrespectful activity to carry out in the building.
Nevertheless, when it came to the time for the concert, and I sat down facing the ארון הקודש (Ark), it felt wrong. I suppose now I see how the settlers in Gaza felt when asked to concede to the destruction of their synagogues. (More fundamental interconnectedness of things, see!) On the other hand, the presence of the pipe organ also felt wrong to me.
One consolation was the inclusion in the programme of Bruch's Kol Nidrei - relevant to the theme of the seminar (still more Dirk Gently-style holism!). That said, Bruch's piece is decided not in the Jewish cantorial style, and moreover only draws on the traditional melody for Kol Nidrei in a small part of it. I'd heard the piece once before, years ago, and had thought perhaps now I might be able to relate to it better, but this was not so.
I also concluded that the acoustics of the building were not really suitable for concerts. Indeed, I wasn't sure they were suitable for prayers, either, not, perhaps, unless the building was packed to capacity, which I would imagine it wouldn't have been more than two or three times a year. Ah well, back to the nice cosy cellar of the Bejt Simcha for me, then, I suppose.
In summary, then, a most enjoyable and edifying seminar and weekend away, and chance to make new friends and meet old ones from Berlin again; and כל הכבוד to Petra and Zlatka of Prague Marom for putting in so much effort to organise it: I really appreciate it.
And a final remark: Anyone who doesn't mind me putting up photos of them in this public forum please email me and I might add some more personal photos.
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only short
Date: 2005-09-30 03:24 pm (UTC)I am surprised to hear what a 'golem' really is. I just know the 'golem' in lord of the rings which is definetly not a Jewish mythology.
If you want to see red squirels you don't need to go far just over the channel. They are everywhere.
Thank you for showing that interesting link. I also read about your Berlin trip. I can't remember what colour the 'Brandenburger Tor' had. We just passed it to get into the DDR and were always controlled. We went there when it was open as well. But I did not look at the colour.
Shabbat Shalom
S.O
Re: only short
Date: 2005-10-01 09:10 pm (UTC)Re: only short
Date: 2010-03-29 01:53 am (UTC)Defaming?
Well, he was spitting on the cross. Many priests are being spat in Jerusalem now. Considering the long period between incidents, one must wander, is it a part of Jewish culture?
Re: only short
Date: 2010-03-31 09:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-11 09:07 am (UTC)