The Jewish Minority and Post-War Czechoslovakia

Abstract

Early in 1944, Arnošt Frischer, official National-Jewish representative in the Czechoslovak State Council, presented President Beneš with his carefully prepared Memorial Treatise — highlighting the most pressing themes — about issues affecting Czechoslovak Jews with the coming liberation of the Republic.¹ The Treatise aimed to initiate a discussion about the position of Jews in post-war Czechoslovakia. Frischer, however, was a kind of a maverick among the exiles whose political relations with his home organisation, the National-Jewish Council, were tense.² Frischer and Zelmanovits, the head of the Council, differed especially in their perception of how Jews might fit into liberated Czechoslovakia.³ Frischer expressed more understanding for the new Czechoslovak minority policy. The Treatise, prepared personally by Frischer, ought to be considered his individual initiative. Yet its importance was emphasised by Frischer’s status as the official representative of Jews in the Czechoslovak parliament during the war. Additionally, in September 1945, he became chairman of the Council of Jewish Religious Communities in Bohemia and Moravia, an umbrella organisation of the Jews in the post-war Czech lands.⁴ As Frischer was the only person who presented such an elaborate analysis of the Jewish position in Czechoslovakia his views should thus be at the centre of our analysis of Czechoslovak policy towards the Jews.