Hartmanice - Dobrá Voda - Šimon Adler Museum
The museum was officially opened on July 9, 1997. The museum depicts the life of the Jewish community in Šumava. Social events of supra-regional importance are held in the hall above the museum.
Museum Dr. Šimon Adler was built in 1997 as a memorial to the Jewish historian and rabbi who was born here and became a victim of the Holocaust in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. The introduction of the exhibition is dedicated to his life and the fates of his sons Sinae and Matytiah Adler, living in Israel.
The second part of the exhibition is dedicated to the culture of the Jews and the religion of the Jewish population in the West Bohemian borderland from Kraslice in the north to Modrava in the south. The exhibition is presented with a list and photo documentation of 110 defunct Jewish communities with preserved building monuments and also presents objects from the daily life of the Jewish community. The exhibition also includes the reconstruction of the original kosher slaughterhouse and the interior of the Pošumav pub.
The penultimate part of the unique exhibits presents the visitor mainly with Jewish sacred objects from the collections of the West Bohemian Museum. The documentation of the life of a Jewish family is divided into the most important milestones: birth, circumcision of boys, bar mitzvah, holy day and end of life.
The conclusion of the exhibition is a reconstruction of the interior, documenting the daily life of Jews in the region at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when merchant Wilhelm Adler lived here and Šimon Adler spent his childhood and school years here.
The concept of the exhibition and memorial, which is primarily oriented towards the daily life of the Jewish minority in the western border of Bohemia, is beneficial for the knowledge of the multi-ethnic population of Šumava and shows that people of different faiths and different nationalities living in the same geographical environment can form a unified residential community, if they do not become subject to political manipulation.
The museum was created on the initiative and with the financial contribution of Mr. Matytiah Adler, vice president of Touro College Jerusalem / New York, at the expense of the city of Hartmanice and the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic. The museum includes an auditorium for 50 visitors. The building also houses an exhibition of the history of Hartmanice and the surrounding area, including examples of traditional Šumava crafts. The museum is located in the settlement of Dobrá Voda near Hartmanice near the church of St. Vintíre and the healing spring springing up at a short distance from it. The view from Dobrá Voda of the surrounding countryside with Kašperk Castle is one of the most beautiful views in Šumava.
In the second half of the last century, the building served as the administrative center of a military district.
The museum has a plaque commemorating PhDr. Simon Adler. Šimon Adler was born on September 15, 1889 in Dobrá Voda near Hartmanice. After rabbinical training, he worked in Topoľčany, Slovakia, where he studied in 1897 - 1901.
He then continued his education at the rabbinical seminary in Frankfurt am Main in the years 1901 - 1905 and at the universities of Würzburg and Giessen in the years 1905 - 1908. He also worked as a teacher at the Israelitische Fortsbildungsschule (1909 - 1913) in Basel, Switzerland. Here he continued his university studies. Just before the First World War he taught in Antwerp, Belgium.
In the years 1915 - 1916 he was a rabbi in Staňkov, and at the same time an extraordinary student at the German University in Prague.
From 1914 until the 20s of the last century, he was the archivist of the Jewish Religious Community in Prague, in the 20s and 30s he also worked in the Supreme Council of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Bohemia, in particular he participated in the activities of its monument commission, while teaching religion not only at various state schools, but also at Jewish schools in Antwerp in the years 1921 - 1926. At that time he was already a rabbi in Zbraslav.
In 1943, he went on a transport to Terezín and from there to the extermination camp in Auschwitz, where he died in the summer of 1944.
In Dobrá Voda, his two sons opened a museum dedicated to his memory and the Jewish community in Šumava.
