21st March 1939
Postcard sent through the feldpost service to an address in Osnabrück. The photograph depicting the town of Holešov in Bohemia & Moravia. A philatelic 'halfway house'. The Protectorate being proclaimed on16th March 1939, this postcard uses a Czech stamp (Mi.349) with the first Protectorate overprints being issued 15th July 1939. Ref: 21.03.1939
Holešov
Under the Nazi occupation, 200 Jewish families were deported from Holesov to extermination camps, with almost no survivors returning to the town. The 'New Synagogue', built in 1893, was torched and destroyed by the Nazi occupiers in 1941-42. The synagogue appurtenances were later transferred to the Central Jewish Museum in Prague.
After World War II a small community was reestablished, affiliated to the Kyjov community. The Jewish quarter was restored, including the cemetery and the old synagogue, which from 1964 housed a museum of Moravian Jewry, a branch of the Jewish State Museum in Prague. Community records, ḥevra kaddisha statutes, and other documents covering the years from 1653 to 1914 were preserved in the National Library in Jerusalem and in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Johanan b. Isaac, rabbi of the Hambro Synagogue of the London Ashkenazi community at the beginning of the 18th century, was a native of Holesov, as was Gerson Wolf, the historian.
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