20 December 2019

Reading Saint Luke’s Gospel
in Advent 2019: Luke 20

‘A man planted a vineyard …’ (Luke 20: 9) … a small vineyard in Platanias near Rethymnon in Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

During the Season of Advent this year, I am joining many people in reading a chapter from Saint Luke’s Gospel each morning. In all, there are 24 chapters in Saint Luke’s Gospel, so this means being able to read through the full Gospel, reaching the last chapter on Christmas Eve [24 December 2019].

Why not join me as I read through Saint Luke’s Gospel each morning this Advent?

Luke 20 (NRSVA):

1 One day, as he was teaching the people in the temple and telling the good news, the chief priests and the scribes came with the elders 2 and said to him, ‘Tell us, by what authority are you doing these things? Who is it who gave you this authority?’ 3 He answered them, ‘I will also ask you a question, and you tell me: 4 Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?’ 5 They discussed it with one another, saying, ‘If we say, “From heaven”, he will say, “Why did you not believe him?” 6 But if we say, “Of human origin”, all the people will stone us; for they are convinced that John was a prophet.’ 7 So they answered that they did not know where it came from. 8 Then Jesus said to them, ‘Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.’

9 He began to tell the people this parable: ‘A man planted a vineyard, and leased it to tenants, and went to another country for a long time. 10 When the season came, he sent a slave to the tenants in order that they might give him his share of the produce of the vineyard; but the tenants beat him and sent him away empty-handed. 11 Next he sent another slave; that one also they beat and insulted and sent away empty-handed. 12 And he sent yet a third; this one also they wounded and threw out. 13 Then the owner of the vineyard said, “What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; perhaps they will respect him.” 14 But when the tenants saw him, they discussed it among themselves and said, “This is the heir; let us kill him so that the inheritance may be ours.” 15 So they threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. What then will the owner of the vineyard do to them? 16 He will come and destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.’ When they heard this, they said, ‘Heaven forbid!’ 17 But he looked at them and said, ‘What then does this text mean:

“The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone”?

18 Everyone who falls on that stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls.’ 19 When the scribes and chief priests realized that he had told this parable against them, they wanted to lay hands on him at that very hour, but they feared the people.

20 So they watched him and sent spies who pretended to be honest, in order to trap him by what he said, so as to hand him over to the jurisdiction and authority of the governor. 21 So they asked him, ‘Teacher, we know that you are right in what you say and teach, and you show deference to no one, but teach the way of God in accordance with truth. 22 Is it lawful for us to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?’ 23 But he perceived their craftiness and said to them, 24 ‘Show me a denarius. Whose head and whose title does it bear?’ They said, ‘The emperor’s.’ 25 He said to them, ‘Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ 26 And they were not able in the presence of the people to trap him by what he said; and being amazed by his answer, they became silent.

27 Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him 28 and asked him a question, ‘Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. 29 Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; 30 then the second 31 and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. 32 Finally the woman also died. 33 In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.’

34 Jesus said to them, ‘Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; 35 but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. 36 Indeed they cannot die any more, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. 37 And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. 38 Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.’ 39 Then some of the scribes answered, ‘Teacher, you have spoken well.’ 40 For they no longer dared to ask him another question.

41 Then he said to them, ‘How can they say that the Messiah is David’s son? 42 For David himself says in the book of Psalms,

“The Lord said to my Lord,
‘Sit at my right hand,
43 until I make your enemies your footstool’.”

44 David thus calls him Lord; so how can he be his son?’

45 In the hearing of all the people he said to the disciples, 46 ‘Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and love to be greeted with respect in the market-places, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honour at banquets. 47 They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.’

A prayer for today:

A prayer today from the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG, United Society Partners in the Gospel:

Let us pray for Guyana preparing for elections to be held on 2 March 2020.

Tomorrow: Luke 21.

Yesterday: Luke 19.

‘Now there were seven brothers’ (Luke 20: 29) … the Seven Brothers Taverna at the Harbour in Rethymnon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

Hidden stories of Jewish
Bratislava: 4, the Steiner
antiquarian bookshop

The Steiner Antiquarian bookshop is a literary landmark in the old town in Bratislava (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

During last month’s visit to Bratislava, two of us waited for over half an hour for a booked guide who never showed. Eventually, we made our own impromptu tour of Jewish Bratislava, visiting major sites associated with the stories of the Jewish community in the Slovak capital.

The sites we visited included the area that was once the mediaeval Jewish ghetto, the site of the earliest synagogue at the present Ursuline Church, the Chatam Sofer Memorial commemorating the city’s most famous rabbi, the site of the former Neolog Synagogue, the Holocaust Memorial on Rybné Square, the city’s last surviving synagogue on Heydukova Street, and the Museum of Jewish Culture on Židovská Street.

As I pored over my photographs from Bratislava in recent days, I realised I had also come across many other stories of Bratislava’s Jewish communities, including a world chess grandmaster and author, a resistance hero who saved lives during the Holocaust, the lost portal of a mediaeval synagogue, an international wrestler, a visiting Russian pianist and composer, an antiquarian bookshop, and a man who stood up bravely to anti-Semitic gangs.

Rather than tell these hidden stories in detail in one or two blog postings, I decided – as with my recent tales of Viennese Jews – to post occasional blog postings over the next few weeks that re-tell some of these stories, celebrating a culture and a community whose stories should never be forgotten.

Antikvariát Steiner or the Steiner Antiquarian bookshop at Ventúrska 22, in the heart of the old city, has shelves stacked with antiquarian books, old prints, graphics and postcards. It dates from 1847, and was restored in 1991.

Sigmund Steiner (1821-1908), who is seen as the founder of this shop, was born in the Moravian town of Kojetín, now in the eastern Czech Republic. After the death of his father, Herman Steiner (1788-1832), he grew up in the home of his older brother, ‘a religious workman,’ and became a librarian. Sigmund had dreams of becoming a rabbi, and arrived in the 1830s with nothing in Bratislava, then known as Pressburg and an important city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Giving up his dreams of becoming a rabbi, Sigmund combined his Jewish Orthodox traditions with a secular education. He married the widowed Josephine König (née Bendiner), the widow of a watchmaker.

When her first husband died, Josephine’s brother in Vienna tried to help her to set up a second-hand bookshop and lending library by sending a box of books by classic German writers. Josephine set up a bookshop on Židovská Street or Jewish Street, in the so-called Jewish quarter, in 1847. A year later, Josephine married Sigmund Steiner, and from then on the shop was run under his name.

Josephine and Sigmund Steiner were the parents of three children. They lived a religious life and closed the bookshop on Shabbat, but raised their three children according to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch’s maxim, Torah im derech eretz (having a secular and Jewish education), an attitude reflected in the stock of the bookshop: it had both religious Jewish items and classics of world literature.

The Steiner Antiquarian bookshop moved to Ventúrska in 1880 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Their eldest son, Hermann, who inherited the bookshop, married Selma Goldberger in 1877 and they were the parents of ten children. After the Jewish ghetto was abolished in Bratislava, Herman and Selma Steiner bought the three-storey building at Venturgasse (Ventúrska) in 1880 and moved their family and the bookshop there. They also bought a summerhouse, which they called the ‘Garden’ and where they grew 1,000 fruit trees.

The family belonged to an Orthodox-Zionist stream of Judaism. Herman and Selma-Sara Steiner were the parents of nine children, and during World War I four of their sons served in the Austro-Hungarian army – Siegfried, Max, Gustav and Józsi – and all four returned from the war uninjured.

Herman and Sara Steiner died in Bratislava before World War II. When Hermann died, the city’s German-language newspaper, the Pressburger Zeitung, called him a ‘true Pressburg citizen.’

His sons Max and Józsi inherited the bookshop on Ventúrska. But their eldest son William was the only one of their nine children who would survive the Holocaust; five of their 16 grandchildren were murdered during the Holocaust.

Under the Nazis, the Steiner antiquarian bookshop was ‘Aryanised’ by a Slovak writer, Ľudo Ondrejov. Four members of the Steiner family worked for the new Aryan ‘owner’ – no money changed hands to denote the change in ownership. Soon, the new owner formally declared the Steiners ‘surplus’ or unneeded workers.

Dr Gustav-Mordechai Steiner (1893-1944), the seventh of nine children born to Herman and Selma-Sara Steiner, was decorated as a medical officer in the Austrian army during World War I. He married Gita Kürcz, the daughter of a metal trader, in 1930, and they were the parents of two children: Karl-Nathan and Alice-Sara.

Gustav ran a medical practice from their home in Bratislava and Gita ran the clinic, while Gustav also worked several hours a week at the Jewish hospital in Bratislava.

Dr Gustav Steiner’s license to practice medicine was revoked in June 1940, but he continued treating patients, including Jewish refugees. Later he was allowed to practice again, but he was forced to relocate with his family to the village of Stupava.

Gustav, Gita and their two children were imprisoned in October 1944. Gustav and Alice were sent on the last transport from Bratislava to Auschwitz on 17 October 1944. Alice was murdered in the gas chambers in Birkenau on 19 October 1944, a day before her tenth birthday. Gustav was sent from Auschwitz to Kaufring, a satellite camp of Dachau, on 27 October 1944 and was murdered there in December 1944. Gita and her son Nathan were deported to Bergen-Belsen and survived. Nathan died in Bratislava in 1948.

By 1949, all surviving members of the family had moved to Israel, apart from Selma, who was Siegfried’s daughter, and Lydia, who was Józsi’s daughter. In Israel, Herman and Sara Steiner’s grandson, Nathan Steiner, now heads the Union of Czechoslovak Immigrants and is active in commemorating the Jews of Czechoslovakia.

Selma Steinerová (1925-2010) was the only person in Siegfried Steiner’s five-member immediate family to survive the Holocaust. She was deported to the Czech concentration camp in Terezín or Theresienstadt, 70 km north of Prague. After World War II, she returned to Bratislava, and was the fourth generation of the Steiner family in the city. Selma was almost 20 and an orphan when she returned to Bratislava from Theresienstadt, and at first she lived with Alexander Albrecht and his family.

The post-war government agreed to return all confiscated property to the Steiners in 1948. However, almost immediately, the state confiscated all small businesses, and the Steiner family once again was living on the wrong side of history. The summerhouse, with the ‘garden’ where 1,000 fruit trees once grew, became the site of Slavín, the monument to the Soviet troops who liberated Bratislava in 1945.

Until 1989, the state-owned bookshop, ‘Books,’ was the only major bookseller allowed to operate in Slovakia. Selma Steinerová worked for a wholesale company supplying the government bookshop. After the fall of communism, at the age of 66, she reopened her family bookshop Bratislava in 1991 at its original location on Ventúrska in the heart of old town.

With its small, simple oval sign, ‘Steiner,’ the shop soon became one of the city’s cultural symbols. She initiated and supported a special imprint, Pressburg, dedicated to the history of Bratislava, at the Marenčín publishing house.

Martin Trančík, a Swiss economic history and civil rights student in Basel and a son of Slovak emigrants, wrote a thesis piecing together the mosaic of the Steiner family, focussing on their Jewish Orthodox traditions and how they were affected by the Holocaust and by modern times. His thesis was published in German as Zwischen Alt-und Neuland (‘Between Old and New’) in Bratislava in 1996, and was translated into Slovak a year later.

Selma Steinerová died in 2010. Since then, the shop has been owned by former employees who continue running it under the Steiner family name. The oval sign with the Steiner still hangs outside.

‘May their memory be a blessing’ … זיכרונה לברכה

‘May their souls be bound up in the bond of everlasting life’ … a memorial to the Steiner family at the antiquarian shop on Ventúrska recalls their sufferings in the Holocaust (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)