The Czech town trying to keep its Jewish past buried
Tomas Jelinek stands over a broken headstone and scrapes at patches of cement obscuring the name. Sweating heavily in spite of the chilly afternoon, he brushes away the last patches and squints at the inscription.
"Herlitzka," he decides. "Bernhard Herlitzka. Died… April 1879. I can't make out the date."
There's not much more to go on. The broken tombstone lies face up in the grass, with perhaps a dozen or so more beside it, some whole, others in fragments. The inscriptions are a mixture of German and Hebrew. "Beloved daughter…" begins one. "Here lies…" reads another. The rest is lost.
"We can find the story of a person," says Tomas Jelinek, formerly head of Prague's Jewish community.
"We have the files of the Chevra Kadisha - the Jewish burial society, where we can find the position of the graves, the text that was on the gravestone and so on."
"We usually try to contact the relatives. We sometimes find direct heirs," he adds. "They're surprised, touched. Some of them are really excited."
So far Mr Jelinek has recovered 34 headstones in and around Prostejov. He has just loaded this one and a dozen more into a trailer at a nearby village, hence the sweating.
"The whole cellar was made from them. They weren't hard to find," the villager tells me. He says he'd rather not give his name.
"I'm just returning what should never have been taken."
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39973195
