Returns to Brno: ŠTETL FEST revives the city’s Jewish stories

Brno’s ŠTETL FEST returns for its fifth edition from August 26 to 30, bringing together history and memory with contemporary Jewish culture, music, theatre and debate. This year’s theme, Returns, focuses on descendants of Jewish families coming back to Brno and on restoring forgotten stories to the places where they unfolded. At the heart of the festival is the site of the Great Synagogue, destroyed by the Nazis in 1939, which will once again become a gathering place filled with music, conversation and Jewish life.

Bringing Jewish culture into the city

ŠTETL FEST is an international multi-genre festival of Jewish culture, but its organisers deliberately interpret that description broadly. Its programme ranges from history and remembrance to concerts, theatre, literature, architecture and discussions of contemporary social issues.

Barbora Dočkalová (centre)|Photo: EDU Brno City Museum

Events take place across Brno, often in locations directly connected with the city’s Jewish history. In that sense, the city itself becomes one of the festival’s protagonists. As Barbora Dočkalová, head of the ŠTETL Center for Jewish Culture, explains, the aim is not simply to look back at a vanished community.

“What we are really trying to do is not simply to commemorate a world that disappeared. We want to show that Jewish culture is a living culture, and that Jewish history is an integral part of the history of Brno and the whole of Central Europe. At the same time, we want to create opportunities for people to meet – Jewish, non-Jewish, local, international, people of different generations and different backgrounds. It is a festival about Jewish culture, but ultimately it is also a festival about the city and the place we share.”

The meaning of “Returns”

The theme of the 2026 festival is Returns. One aspect is very literal: descendants of Jewish families who once lived in Brno and the surrounding region are travelling back to places connected with their parents and grandparents. But Barbora Dočkalová says the idea also refers to restoring stories, names and places that have largely disappeared from the city’s collective memory.

“It works on several different levels. The most literal one is the return of descendants of Jewish families who once lived in Brno and the surrounding region. Many of them are coming from different parts of the world to places connected with their parents and grandparents. But there are other kinds of returns as well. We are returning forgotten stories to the city, returning names to places and bringing attention back to buildings and sites whose Jewish history has almost disappeared from public memory.”

For Barbora, however, a return does not mean attempting to recreate the Jewish Brno that existed before the Holocaust.

“We are not trying to reconstruct the past. You cannot return to the world that existed before the Holocaust. But you can return its stories to the present. I think this distinction is very important to us.”

The Great Synagogue comes back to life

Perhaps the most powerful expression of this idea can be found at the corner of Přízova and Spálená streets. The Great Synagogue stood there from 1855 until March 1939, when it was burned down shortly after the Nazi occupation of Brno. For decades the site remained essentially empty. During ŠTETL FEST, it becomes one of the festival’s principal venues. The programme includes exhibitions, concerts, theatre and talks, as well as the unveiling of a Poesiomat – an audio installation featuring memories, liturgical songs, archival material and contemporary texts connected with the site.

Barbora Dočkalová|Photo: Eva Yildizová / ŠTETL FEST / FB

The location will also receive a new street name, U Synagogy, or “By the Synagogue”. On Friday evening, festival-goers will gather at a long table there for a Shabbat dinner. The weekend culminates on Sunday with a Jewish market featuring music, food and activities.

“This is probably the most symbolic return of the whole festival. The Great Synagogue stood there from 1855 until the night of March 17 to 18, 1939, when the synagogue was burned down just days after the Nazi occupation of Brno. It had been one of the most important centres of Jewish religious and communal life in Brno. Today, there is no synagogue there, of course. For decades there was essentially an empty space. So during the festival we are going to bring life back to this place – not by rebuilding the synagogue, of course, but by gathering here again.”

A history that stretches far beyond Brno

Another strand of the festival follows the stories of Jewish families that played important roles in Brno and the surrounding region. Their descendants return to the places associated with their families, while exhibitions, discussions, walks and the laying of Stolpersteine – known in Czech as Kameny zmizelých – trace the lives they once led there.

The programme deliberately looks beyond persecution and the Holocaust. Jewish Brno was also a world of rabbis, scientists, industrialists, architects and artists who helped shape the modern city through business, architecture, science and culture. And when persecution and war scattered those families, their histories did not end. They continued elsewhere in Europe and across the world. Their descendants therefore bring back not only memories of the Brno their families left behind, but also stories of what came afterwards.

For ŠTETL FEST, that is another meaning of “return”: reconnecting present-day Brno with a Jewish history that was once deeply embedded in the city – and whose branches now reach far beyond Central Europe.