Return of the Stones

Return of the Stones Memorial

In January 2019 I first became aware that Jewish gravestones had been cut up and made into cobble stones for use in city streets during the communist era. I wrote about this on the Walking on Gravestones post. I’d heard that the Jewish community had an agreement with the City of Prague that during street renovation works in the Wenceslas Square area if any cobbles that could be identified as having come from a Jewish gravestone they would be returned to the Jewish community. An idea had been floated that these stones would form some kind of memorial but there were no details at the time. So skip forward to 2024 and I’ve gone back to the subject to see what had changed.

As street works progressed by Spring 2022 more than 6000 cobbles weighing about seven tons had been identified and returned to the Jewish community so thoughts again turned to a memorial. After submitting a memorial design to the city, permission was given in March 2022 but no grant or subsidy was forthcoming from the city. It was crowdfunding that provided the estimated CZK750,000 so sculptor/artist Jaroslav Rona and his wife Lucie could be commissioned to create a memorial to be called “Return of the Stones”. It was unveiled on September 7th 2022.

return of the stones memorial with eye of god in prague zizkov old jewish cemetery — The “eye” of the Return of the Stones Memorial

The memorial is a set of nine partly-finished cobble stone walls surrounding a convex “eye of God”. The number nine represents the Kaballah transition from the physical to spiritual world. The tallest of the nine walls faces Jerusalem. As the memorial only contains about half of the Jewish gravestone cobbles that have been retrieved from the Wenceslas Square area since 2019 there is a plan to continue adding stones to the walls. The stones are not glued or mortared. Instead they are connected by iron wires to an iron frame on the inside of each wall.

A Literal Return

return of the stones memorial in prague zizkov old jewish cemetery with tv tower in background — Proximity to the TV Tower

“Return of the Stones” isn’t just a return to the community. It’s a return to where the stones came from. As you can read on the Žižkov Old Jewish Cemetery post, in 1960 that cemetery was largely bulldozed and covered in earth to make a park. In 1984 the park was partly dug up to install the foundations of the TV Tower so many thousands of buried headstones were sent to landfill or sent for cutting into cobbles. The reason why the Wenceslas Square area was of primary importance was that it was renovated in the late 1980’s in preparation for a visit by Soviet President Gorbachov. Thousands of cobbles would have been needed so it was highly likely that stones from Žižkov would be used.