The Position of the State toward the Jewish Religious Community in the Czech Lands in 1956-1968: The Vicious Circle of Control, Repressions and "Condescendence
Abstract
On 14 October 1949 the State Office for Church Affairs was established. This office was under the control of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
This study analyzes the pillars of so-called church politics (control, repressions, economically and politically motivated "condescendence" in Czechoslovakia - one of the satellites of the Soviet Union in the time of de-Stalinization and in the period of the so-called reform communism culminating in the Prague Spring (1968). It focuses on the Jewish community in the Czech Lands (in 1965 the community had six to seven thousand members; in 1967 not even five thousand).
The study shows that also during that period church politics was an outgrowth of party politics, which maintained censorship and atheism. Communist propaganda misused the Jewish community by creating an image of the Soviet Union and its allies as conscious fighters for peace, against fascism and neo-Nazism in capitalist states.