A city in the Central Bohemian Region, Czech Republic.
Mlada Boleslav is located on the left bank of the Jizera River, 31 miles (50km) northeast of Prague. Until 1918 Mlada Boleslav and the surrounding region were part of the Austrian Empire.
With the communities of Kolin, Roudnice, and Nachod, Mlada Boleslav was one of the four major Jewish communities of Bohemia known by the Hebrew acronym KRBN. Mlada Boleslav also became known as the “Jerusalem of the Jizera River,” attesting to its importance.
The Jewish community of Mlada Boleslav is first mentioned in 1471, and is noted in a Hebrew document from 1556. Eleven families lived in the town in 1570, and by 1579 the community was also home to a synagogue. The cemetery was consecrated shortly thereafter, in 1584, and the New School was built at the end of the century.
Mlada Boleslav was owned by various noble Czech families until 1594. A Jewish resident of the town, David Fleckeles, contributed a large sum of money (1,000 florins) in order to purchase the city’s independence.
At the beginning of the 17th century Mlada Boleslav’s Jewish Quarter contained 31 houses, a town hall, a hospital, and a mikvah (ritual bath). There were 120 Jewish adults living in Mlada Boleslav in 1615. The Jewish population rose to 775 in 1687, due mainly to an influx of Jews from Poland fleeing the Khmelnytsky Massacres of 1648-1649, and Jews who had been expelled from Vienna in 1670.
The Jewish cemetery is owned by the Jewish community of Prague, which funds its continued maintenance. The cemetery has managed to survive relatively intact, and contains tombstones from the 17th century through the 20th century, as well as a pre-burial house. The cemetery can be accessed with permission.
After the Nazis invaded Czecholsovakia in 1938, life stayed fairly quiet in Mlada Boleslav until early 1943, when the Jews of the town were rounded up and incarcerated in the castle at the southern end of the town square. Eventually they were transported to Terezin and then Auschwitz. There was virtually no surviving Jewish community after the war and in the early 1960s the derelict small synagogue was finally completely demolished.
The cemetery remained and has a resident caretaker who looks after the grounds. The Jewish community in Prague refurbished the prayer hall and the two small tahara houses within the cemetery. An exhibition about what happened to the Jews of the town is laid out in the prayer hall. In 2018 we arranged for a memorial to those who had been murdered during the war to be placed outside the prayer hall.
In 2008 we planned a 6oth birthday party for Mike, which was centred around the building which had been the location of Jul,ius Haurowitz’s general store. This had been converted to a hotel called the Zlaty Kohout (The Golden Cockerel). More than 30 members of the family came to stay in the hotel for the last weekend of July.
