Loštice Shabbat Weekend

Loštice Shabbat Weekend

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Join us for an exciting and educational weekend with Dr. Judith Renyi, a descendant of one of Loštice’s families, as she tells us about her family and we celebrate our Loštice Torah Scroll.  There are two events left that Ohev Shalom will be hosting which you can read about below:

Saturday, March 8th at 9:00 AM-Lostice Shabbat with Nosh and Drosh: We will celebrate our precious Loštice Torah Scroll, and welcome Dr. Judith Renyi, a descendant of one of Loštice’s families and a researcher of the town’s history. Following the early part of the service, we will break for our “Nosh and Drosh” session in the reception room. Rabbi Miller, with the assistance of Dr. Renyi’s detailed research, will walk through a typical Shabbat in Loštice during the time when it had an active Jewish community.

Saturday, March 8th at 7:00 PM-Evening Presentation: “From Country Peddler to City Proprietor in One Generation: A History of Jewish Emancipation in Moravia”  From the mid-16th Century when Jews first settled in Loštice, Moravian Jews were narrowly confined in their personal, commercial and political lives. Outcast from most cities, tolerated sporadically, barred from many types of employment and freedom of movement, all but one son per family forbidden to marry, left most impoverished l’dor vador. Even when tolerated, the Jews of Moravia were physically as well as spiritually kept apart from the Gentile population and Western civilization. Beginning in 1781 in Bohemia and 1782 in Moravia, a first wave of reforms removed and reduced many restraints. For the first time Jews were required to attend state-funded Western education, use the local vernacular in business and public discourse, and adopt prescribed German names. Final restrictions were removed from both peasants and Jews in Emperor Franz Josef’s 1867 emancipation. The Jews burst from their confines and flourished in every aspect of Western culture, but in doing so they also assimilated, Rabbinical and local Jewish Community power weakened significantly, and the old Jewish Street in Loštice and in every small Moravian town where they had lived for centuries was mostly emptied. This history of tremendous upheaval in Jewish life in the 19th century will be illustrated by my father’s family and friends who in the course of one generation abandoned their ancestral villages to put their stamp on Western Civilization. 

Dr. Judith Renyi’s Biography: 

Dr. Judith Rényi was born and raised in Upper Darby by refugee parents from Vienna and Moravian-Silesian Czechoslovakia. Her paternal grandmother’s family lived in Loštice from the mid-sixteenth century until 1899. Judith retired in 2015 from a long career as a non-profit executive of foundations dedicated to improving public education policy and performance at local, state, and national levels. She has also twice been an academic dean and most recently served as the executive director of Mayor Nutter’s Commission on Literacy and Trustee of the Community College of Philadelphia.  In the fall of 2019, she began to translate (from German) 325 letters written to her father from family, friends, and colleagues after he emigrated to New York in 1937. She has researched every reference, and every person mentioned in the letters to build an understanding of the people, history, life, and culture of the Jews of Moravia and Silesia. Her work also discovered what happened to her father’s loved ones after their last letter written in November 1941, and why they had not left Europe in time to save their lives, questions that haunted her father for the rest of his life.