Kdo jsou Židé? – Spiegel Paul (2018)

This Czech-language book explores the intimate beauty of Judaism rather than offering another account of the Holocaust or the fratricidal conflict between Israelis and Palestinians over their shared homeland. It is an intimate look at the beauty, richness and pain of thousands of years of Jewish cultural tradition, and therefore also at an important and neglected part of our own cultural identity. It examines the Judaism with which we live and which we also carry within us, yet know very little about. Paul Spiegel was born in 1937, the son of a cattle dealer, in Warendorf, in what is now North Rhine-Westphalia. After SA troops attacked the family during Kristallnacht in 1938, they moved to Belgium in the hope of finding safety. There, however, the family members were arrested and ended up in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Dachau. After liberation, Spiegel returned to his home town with his mother. Unlike many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, he never considered emigrating to Israel. In 2000, he became chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. He died in April 2006, shortly before his sixty-eighth birthday.