ABSTRACT
As we noted in chapter 2, the November 1989 anti-communist Velvet Revolution represented another decisive, external, politically driven historical watershed that for members of the Jewish community has had profound life-changing consequences. Among other things, the collapse of Czechoslovak communism ended the long-standing official hostility to Israel (with official anti-Zionism often masking anti-Semitism), the close state monitoring of the only two officially permitted Czech and Slovak representative Jewish religious organizations, and the calculated attempts to obliterate Jewish memory. Postcommunist democratic developments have enabled Czech and Slovak Jews of all three generations to abandon strategies of concealment of their Jewish identity, meet openly, and publicly acknowledge their Jewish identity without official hostility and fear of police informers.
