A new issue of the journal Judaica Bohemiae (Vol. 53/2018, 2) came out at the end of December 2018. The opening study by Pavel Kocman (Zu den Umständen der Erteilung des Privilegiums für die mährischen Juden im Jahr 1629) explores the circumstances surrounding the granting of a charter for Moravian Jews in 1629 – an important document that redefined the legal status of Jews in Moravia after two centuries. On the basis of a careful analysis of the source base, this study determines the key influence exerted on the preparation of the charter by Cardinal Franz von Dietrichstein, the Governor of Moravia in the period after the Battle of White Mountain, as well as the influence the charter had on accelerating the process of institutionalizing the provincial representation of the Moravian Jewry. On the basis of Slovak oral history projects, the next study by Monika Vrzgulová (The Memory of the Return of Slovak Holocaust Survivors in Jewish and Non-Jewish Testimonies) examines how Shoah survivors and eye-witnesses remember their return home after the Second World War. In the ‘Documents’ section, a study by Pavel Sládek (Moses ben Aaron Morawczyk and his Treatise on the System of Education, 1634/1635) looks at the life and work of the Jewish pedagogue Moses ben Aaron Morawczyk. This study provides the first English translation of Morawczyk’s treatise ‘On the System of Education’ (Ketzad seder mishnah), placing it in the context of early modern Ashkenazi scholarship and learning.
In the ‘Reports’ section, Lenka Uličná provides information about the 11th Congress of the European Association for Jewish Studies (EAJS), which took place in Kraków in July 2018, and Daniel Baránek informs about the Visual Antisemitica workshop that was held by the Institute of Art History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in September 2018 in Prague as part of the project “Visual Manifestations of Anti-Semitism in the Czech Lands from the Middle Ages to the Present Day”. The final section of the journal contains a review by Ines Koeltzsch of Klaus Hödl’s book Zwischen Wienerlied und Der Kleine Kohn. Juden in der Wiener populären Kultur um 1900 (2017) and a review by Arno Pařík of Rudolf Klein’s book Metropolitan Jewish Cemeteries of the 19 th and 20 th Centuries in Central and Eastern Europe: A Comparative Study (2018).