The key idea of our project is to convey to the widest possible readership detailed abstracts of the testimonies of Roma and Sinti and thus their personal and irreplaceable experience of the Second World War. We hope that the Testimonies of Roma and Sinti project will contribute to greater awareness of their genocide and will be an irreplaceable source of information for researchers, relatives of the victims, or anyone else interested in this important topic.
First of all, we defined the project geographically: we focused on the testimonies of Roma and Sinti from the Bohemian lands (today's Czech Republic) and Slovakia. The second definition is that we are only processing printed testimonies into the database. A valuable, and extremely demanding, part of the database is the detailed abstracts of these testimonies prepared by Romani studies experts in cooperation with historians and linguistic stylists. These abstracts are important not only for Czech and Slovak readers, as many publications with testimonies are not easily accessible, but especially for users from abroad - whether researchers, members of Romani communities or any other interested parties - as the vast majority of the hundreds of published testimonies exist only in Czech, Slovak or Romani, and are thus inaccessible to most people from abroad.
Within the database, the testimonies are analyzed according to several criteria, which allow detailed searches and their classification, for example, according to the type of war experience (internment, participation in armed struggle, hiding, etc.). In the analysis, we then focused mainly on geographical data. Therefore, projections of collected data on maps are an integral part of the database, which allow us to show the war trajectory of individuals and groups, to show, for example, the locations of mass murders or guerrilla fighting, or to search for testimonies related to a place.
At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, the religious Jewish community in the Czech lands underwent a change which to some extent paralleled the developments in the society as a whole. In the middle of the 19th century, religious practices still played a central role in the daily life of every Jew. They included regular attendance of services, observing holidays, receiving basic religious education, respecting the rabbinical authority and traditional household roles. -- Yet, merely within several decades, these formal manifestations of Jewishness changed radically in the Czech lands, especially in Bohemia. The basic thesis of this paper is that the life of Jewish communities and affiliated institutions in the Czech lands was influenced mainly by a decrease in the number of village communities and emergence of reformed urban communities; a decline of rabbinical education and the prestige of that profession; as well as the fact that only very few Jewish refugees from Poland and Russia sought the Czech lands as their destination. ...