Any visit to a Jewish cemetery is a bittersweet outing, with the gratifying sense of belonging to a longstanding — and still standing — community offsetting the pain of lost ancestors.
The one-hour documentary “House of Life: The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague” effectively multiplies those feelings with an encompassing view of the past and a poignant recognition of the present. Part travelogue and part history lesson, the film covers a number of bases and hits a range of tones.
Veteran documentary maker Allan Miller, an Academy Award–winner for “From Mao to Mozart” (1979), and producer Mark Podwal have made an uneven but generally lovely work, with a handful of cheesy and clumsy moments. Most viewers will see beyond those hiccups and be rewarded commensurately.
“House of Life: The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague” airs 11 p.m. Thursday, April 16 on KQED channel 9. The 2007 film also is available on DVD.
The defining feature of the cemetery is the pastel mosaic of tilted, faded headstones, some 12,000 in all, one leaning on the next. The view in any direction symbolizes centuries of tradition as well as the neglect, and outright abuse, of the Jewish minority by the dominant culture.
The first Jews were interred there in the 15th century, when Prague was the center of Eastern European Jewish life. The number of stones visible above ground represents but a fraction of the 100,000 or so people buried in countless layers in the intervening centuries.
The filmmakers employ a bevy of local professors, historians, tour guides, rabbis and restoration experts to tell the story of the place and the Jewish community. It is a colorful tale of overlapping highs and lows.
Jews thrived in Prague but were also banned on two occasions, with the orders quickly rescinded once the authorities were reminded of the Jews’ essential contribution to the economy. (This is the place where Rabbi Loew was compelled to conjure the Golem to defend his people.)
By that point, the Jews had been shoehorned into a ghetto and were living one on top of the other. “House of Life” suggests, though not as wittily as this, that the cramped accommodations in the cemetery might not be that great a hardship for people already used to crowded conditions.
The film employs a minor-key soundtrack of prayers, hymns and songs that has the eerie feeling, on occasion, of the voices of the dead calling to us. Sometimes it has a calming effect, as if our distant ancestors were reminding us we are part of the same tribe. At other moments it plays like the lament of people whose lives were violently interrupted.
The revelation that the old Jewish cemetery has become a tourist attraction in recent years elicits mixed feelings on the viewer’s part. In what might be the most discomfiting sequence in the documentary, the filmmakers show us the public attention that a sacred Jewish place receives half a century after the Holocaust.
On the other hand, the recurring presence of non-Jewish guides and restorers is downright inspiring. There’s something heartwarming about seeing non-Jews honoring and embracing the dignity and the history of a Jewish burial site.
In other words, “House of Life,” and the cemetery itself, evoke the usual array of emotions of being Jewish in a non-Jewish world.
“House of Life: The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague” airs 11 p.m. Thursday, April 14 on KQED channel 9, and is available on DVD (First Run Features, ($24.95)