JIŘĺ FIEDLER AND THE DOCUMENTATION OF JEWISH SITES
JIŘĺ FIEDLER AND THE DOCUMENTATION OF JEWISH SITES

Summary/Abstract: On 31 January 2014, our colleague Jiří (Jirka) Fiedler was brutally murdered with his wife Dagmar, shortly after going into retirement. In the following text, I would like to commemorate the memory and mission that Jirka left us with his work. Jewish topography was the object of Jirka’s long-term private interest, later becoming the focus of his long-standing career. During his free time and at his own cost, he devoted himself systematically to this much neglected area of Jewish history for more than three decades. His colleague of many years, the director of the Jewish Museum in Prague Leo Pavlát said the following about his life and work at the last farewell with Jiří Fiedler: “In the period when the Communist regime, at best, let Jewish monuments fall into disrepair and, at worst, destroyed them, Jirka – with the rare understanding and support of his wife – documented this unique cultural heritage. He preserved them for the memory of his contemporaries and for those not yet born. There were and still are thousands of photographs and index cards of data on Jewish settlements in Bohemia and Moravia that he extracted from numerous sources. At a time of destruction and with limited resources, Jiří Fiedler did what specialist institutions should have devoted their time to, and for this he earned the animosity of the secret police and aroused the suspicion of others. […] At the Jewish Museum in Prague, he then began to transfer the results of his many years of research to an electronic encyclopaedia of Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia, which is being continually updated and specified – it now has as many as 1,670 entries. Without all the information that Jiří 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. […] He sacrificed his outstanding skills as a translator and literary scholar, as well as his editorial work, to Jewish topography, in the end completely devoting his expertise to this field. Today, it is difficult to fully appreciate the work that he did in this area; both specialists and non-specialists will be drawing on his work for generations to come.

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