FRH Announces the Overall Winner and Finalists of the Religious Heritage Innovator of the Year 2023
Finalist – Jews of Czechia: Yesterday and Today by Miller Mosaic, LLC (USA)
“Jews of the Czech Republic: Yesterday and Today” aspires to become the first documentary to deal with a still largely unexplored event of the Nazi occupation of the Czech Republic during the Second World War: the extensive rescue of Jewish artefacts.
Prayers for Maria Theresa – Maisel Synagogue Prague. Photo: Yael K. Miller
The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was the only Nazi-occupied country where Jews were allowed to collect cultural and religious objects on a large scale and catalogue them to create a museum collection. A general idea still prevails that the collection was created for a future ‘Museum of an Extinct Race’ in Prague. Among the many documents saved, there were 1,564 Czech Torah scrolls which were sold in 1964 to a buyer in the United Kingdom. Many of these scrolls were restored and distributed to Jewish communities throughout the world.
Now Phyllis Zimbler Miller and her daughter, Yael K. Miller, are determined to find out why so many objects were saved from destruction at a time when Jewish culture was to be erased from Europe by the Nazis and what has happened to all the scrolls that were shipped from Prague.
The jury praised the determination of the producers to shed light on this chapter of Jewish history, as the documentation and interviews conducted for the documentary will be of great use for the further study of Jewish culture in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during the Second World War.