News has just reached us at the Memorial Scrolls Trust of the death last week at age 92 of Rabbi Ezra Spicehandler. Through his friendship with the Friedlander family, he and his beloved wife Shirley were frequent visitors to Kent House, and he often led services for Westminster Synagogue.
Jonathan Sarna writes:
"... emeritus professor of Hebrew Literature at HUC-JIR. The son of Abraham Spicehandler, one-time editor of Hadoar, Ezra Spicehandler was ordained and received his Ph.D. at HUC-JIR. Early in his career, he spent time studying Judeo-Persian in Iran, purchasing important manuscripts for HUC-JIR. For 14 years (1966-1980) he served as Dean of the Jerusalem School of HUC-JIR, which he helped to place on a firm footing. He then returned to Cincinnati, where he taught for the remainder of his career. In 1982, he was elected president of the Labor Zionist Alliance. Prof. Spicehandler wrote, edited and translated numerous books, most famously THE MODERN HEBREW POEM ITSELF (1st ed, 1965) with Stanley Burnshaw and Ted Carmi. He was also a recognized expert on H. N. Bialik. Spicehandler taught generations of students at HUC-JIR and was greatly respected for his wide-ranging knowledge and wisdom."
Our thoughts are with his family at this time. May he rest in peace.
Just received a link for Helen Epstein's tribute to Jiri Fiedler in the New York Times yesterday. In case you cannot read the link, here is a cut-and-pasted version for you to read:
“EACH piece of reportage has many authors and it is only thanks to long-established custom that we sign the text with a single name,” wrote the literary journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski. “They arrange contacts, lend us their homes, or quite simply change our lives.”
Jiri Fiedler changed mine. He opened the door to my family history, as he did for hundreds of people who had been cut off from their family pasts by war, dispossession, totalitarianism and emigration. Working mostly alone, unpaid and anonymous for decades under Communism, and later as a researcher at the Jewish Museum in Prague, he documented the history of Jews in the Czech lands and was a prolific and often unacknowledged contributor to reports, books, articles and museum exhibits.
Last week, not long after I received one of his cheerily eccentric emails with attachments about malapropisms in Czech and English, I discovered that he and his wife, Dagmar, had been brutally murdered in their apartment on or about Jan. 31. The news came via an email from someone I’d met on the reportorial road in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands.
Photo
Jiri FiedlerCreditJewish Museum in Prague
Though Jiri and Dagmar Fiedler lived in a panelak, one of the enormous blocks of apartments on the outskirts of Prague, with hundreds of residents around them, their bodies weren’t discovered until two weeks after the murder. At 79 and 75, they were regarded as “old people with a cat,” according to a tabloid story that reported the murder but did not give their names. In that story, the current president of the Czech Republic, Milos Zeman, who once lived in the building, was quoted as saying, “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I didn’t do it.” That was all the press coverage I could find.
Murders are still rare in Prague, and the police declared a news blackout while they conducted their investigation. Dagmar and Jiri’s three children, and his brother, sent a discreet notice of death to family friends and colleagues. Most of the people who knew him and his work remained unaware of his death. Jiri had always been reticent, like many in his generation who had grown up under Nazism and spent their adulthood under Communist rule. He was naturally a loner, “individualistic and a little bit mysterious,” according to Arno Parik, one of his colleagues at the Jewish Museum.
I first met Jiri by mail — snail mail — in 1990, a year after the Velvet Revolution, the nonviolent transition from Communist to democratic rule in what was then Czechoslovakia. I was writing a book about three generations of women in my Central European Jewish family and had sent out inquiries to historians of all kinds, to the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv, and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem and to many other places. One day, I received a letter from Prague.
“Because I myself am engaged in researching the history of the now-extinct Jewish community,” my unknown correspondent began, “I know you have written to the director of the Regional Museum in Jihlava, to the National Library and to the Central Archive. I put some things together in my mind and that is why I allow myself to disturb you with this letter.”
I remember wondering whether this self-deprecating formulation was a Czech convention or a particular personality trait.
“I have at home relatively rich files covering the now-extinct Jewish communities of Bohemia and Moravia. They are mostly documents concerning synagogues, cemeteries and houses, but sometimes you can find in them the names of their owners. Maybe on your next visit you could go to the State Central Archive. I don’t have the time to do it myself. But if you need me, I will be happy to advise you.”
So began our friendship. We met in 1991 at the children’s publishing house where he had worked as a translator and editor for most of his professional life. He was then 56, an elfin man with a pronounced stutter who seemed as modest as the tiny vase of dandelions on his desk. Collecting Judaica was his longtime hobby, he hastened to tell me. It had nothing to do with the rest of his life. He had scrutinized his family tree many times searching for a Jewish ancestor to explain it and found none. “Some people smoke,” he said. “Some people strangle little girls in parks. I bicycle around the country documenting dead Jews.”
I smiled politely. It was not the kind of politically correct remark I’d hear in Cambridge, Mass., where I then lived. Perhaps, given his long and solitary preoccupation with dead Jews, I thought he was pleased to be talking with a live one.
But after that first remark, Jiri Fiedler turned out to be quite shy. I made out that he had been born in the old Moravian city of Olomouc in 1935, that he was 10 when the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia ended, that he had witnessed the retreat of German soldiers and seen concentration camp survivors, who were given temporary housing at his school.
At 15, he came across and grew interested in an old Yiddish newspaper. By himself, working slowly and patiently, he deciphered the Hebrew characters as though they were hieroglyphics and taught himself to read Yiddish. He dated his interest in local history to about the same time. Mistopis, as local history is called in Czech, was one of the few intellectual pursuits that could be safely enjoyed under Communism. He began to ride his bicycle down back roads near his home, photographing and sketching old churches and other ruined buildings, and making lists of historical landmarks.
After completing his doctorate in linguistics, Jiri took a job as a copy editor and by the late 1960s was working for Albatros, a famous publisher of children’s literature in Prague. He translated from Polish and Serbo-Croatian and proofread hundreds of books, but regarded that as his day job.
His passion was mistopis. By the 1970s, his interest widened to include old Jewish cemeteries and synagogues as well as churches. “Those cemeteries,” he told me, “called out to be photographed.” He also began to do rubbings of the inscriptions. The tombstones were so overgrown that he began to carry gardening tools on his bicycle.
A former schoolmate of his worked at the Jewish Museum in Prague, and during the Communist years, Jiri repeatedly tried to gain access to its archive. But the Jewish Museum was closely watched by the secret police during the Communist period and access to state archives was tightly controlled. Academics researching Jews in Renaissance Prague were able to do their work, but applications by individuals researching more recent history were closely tracked and reported.
He continued to amass his maps, postcards, index cards of data on the dead and his photographs alone.
It became an addiction he could not give up. He had deeds and tax records of former Jewish houses and streets; town maps with Jewish houses marked in red (including my father’s hometown and the house my great-grandfather had built); files of correspondence with dozens of local archivists. He knew the locals everywhere he went and by the 1980s had become an international consultant to anyone researching Czech Jews. His Judaica collection filled the shelves and cabinets of one whole room of his four-room apartment and included some 70,000 photographs.
In 1996, after the Jewish Museum was reorganized on post-Communist lines, Jiri was invited to join the staff. He published his one book, “Jewish Sights of Bohemia and Moravia,” and continued to work on the “Encyclopedia of Jewish Settlements in the Czech Republic” a 30-year project that now contains 1,670 entries in electronic form.
He had no Wikipedia page. No one in Prague could locate a résumé or interview or short bio.
Jiri was allergic to personal P.R. Once, when I asked him to raise his hand and be acknowledged at a reception at the American ambassador’s home in Prague, he quipped that I was creating a “cult of personality” around him. In our age of way too much information, Jiri left barely a footprint online.
But just as he had been one of the authors of my reportage, I want to be one of his. Several of the people in Prague who knew him sent me their impressions of him, but none had any firm facts to provide. A neighbor describes an elderly couple who kept to themselves and consulted her only when they had some problem with their cat. Various colleagues have learned that the apartment was not forced open. Nothing seemed to have been stolen. The police have no suspect and no motive.
An announcement posted on the website of the Jewish Museum of Prague is carefully worded. “The circumstances of his death have not yet been fully clarified,” it reads in part. “On account of his work, he earned the animosity of the secret police and aroused the suspicion of others.” And, “At a time when the Jewish cultural heritage of Bohemia and Moravia was treated with utter contempt, he produced a trove of work that can be drawn on by future generations of researchers in the area of Jewish topography.”
Jiri was a man who managed to hold on to his humanity under two of the most brutal periods of totalitarianism in the 20th century. He did so unobtrusively, with grace and a good measure of mischief. His memory is a blessing and an inspiration.
Correction: March 9, 2014
An earlier version of a photo caption with this article misspelled the first name of the researcher. He is Jiri Fiedler, not Jili.
"Jiří Fiedler (1935 – 2014)
It is with great sorrow that we announce the tragic death of Jiri Fiedler, an employee of the Jewish Museum in Prague for many years. The circumstances of his death have not yet been fully clarified. His funeral was held in Prague on Monday, 3 March 2014.
Jiri Fiedler was born in Olomouc and graduated from the Philosophy Faculty at Charles University in Prague. During the Communist regime he worked as an editor, mainly at the children's publishing house Albatros. He was also an acclaimed translator of Serbo-Croatian and Polish literature.
From the 1970s onwards, Jiri Fiedler documented Jewish sites in Bohemia and Moravia out of personal interest. In so doing, he compiled thousands of photographs of synagogues, cemeteries, rabbi's houses and former Jewish schools - many of which were destroyed in subsequent years. In addition, he obtained factual information relating to the photographs, which he meticulously extracted from countless sources. At a time of destruction, Jiri Fiedler did what specialist institutions should have devoted their time to. On account of his work, he earned the animosity of the secret police and aroused the suspicion of others. At a time when the Jewish cultural heritage in Bohemia and Moravia was treated with utter contempt, he produced a trove of work that can be drawn on by future generations of researchers in the area of Jewish topography.
After the fall of the Communist dictatorship, Jiri Fiedler published the book Židovské památky v Čechách a na Moravě (Jewish Sights of Bohemia and Moravia), which to this day is the key source of information on Jewish settlements in what is now the Czech Republic. In 1996 he became employed as a specialist by the Jewish Museum in Prague, where he further developed the results of his many years of research. His findings were gradually transferred to an electronic encyclopaedia of Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia, which is being continually updated - it now has as many as 1,670 entries. Without all the information that Jiri Fiedler selflessly gathered and brought to the museum, several of the museum's projects would never have come to fruition and the work of numerous researchers in the Czech Republic and abroad would not be possible.
Jiri Fiedler was employed at the Jewish Museum in Prague until the end of 2012 but continued to work closely with the museum on an external basis. His sudden death has come as a painful shock to all of the
museum's staff who knew Jiri Fiedler as a helpful colleague and a wonderful person."
