Ceremonial hall next to the cemetery

In 1900, Liberec’s Jewish community built a ceremonial hall by the Jewish cemetery, which was used until the beginning of World War II. That saw the extermination of a large part of the pre-war Jewish community, almost 1,700 people, of whom only 37 survived the Holocaust. After the war, the ceremonial hall fell into disrepair and was eventually used by a company as a coffee warehouse until 1989. 

Memorial to the victims of the Shoah

The present-day leaders of the Jewish community decided to establish a memorial to the victims of the Shoah in the ceremonial hall, following a concept created by Štěpán Gudev, a student at the Faculty of Arts and Architecture, under the guidance of M. A. Jan Stolín, who designed the memorial. The basic idea of the memorial involves lines of light on the ceiling, which point to each of the tragic places where the Jews of Liberec met their deaths. These lines then continue vertically down to the ground, where they come to an end. Next to each vertical line are the names of the people who lost their lives in that place. At the end of each vertical line is the name of the place, as well as a box in which a scroll containing the handwritten names of the victims is kept. One of the strips of light leading down from the ceiling is blue, and symbolises the journey taken by some of the local Jews to Israel. A fragment of the original floor has been preserved with a glass case around it. 

Mission of the memorial

In the words of Michal Hron, chairman of the Jewish community in Liberec, the memorial is "a place that gives the martyred a symbolic grave", but should also continue to serve a variety of social, educational and cultural purposes.