Tomáš Molnár received a cultural award

Interestingly enough, the event that provided the impulse to organise such a festival was the vandalization of the Jewish tombstones at the local cemetery. “At the time, I said to myself that it would be better to respond in a positive way and provide education on the matter…,” recalls T. Molnár. Since then, he says, some 12,000 children and countless other participants have participated in the festival.

Tomáš Molnár became the 34th recipient of this prize. In the past, it was also awarded, among others, to President Václav Havel. The prize is awarded to personalities who have made a significant contribution to the development of cultural, artistic or social life in the region.

Tomáš Molnár comes from an old Protestant family. His great-grandfather Peter Molnár arrived from Hungary in 1782, with the first wave of ministers after the promulgation of the toleration patent, i.e. after the partial "legalization" of the Protestant religion. Tomáš is the seventh generation of ministers in his family and as the son of a minister, he was not allowed to enrol in high school during the communist era. Therefore, he trained as a hand typesetter and began working in the legendary second-hand bookshop in Prague's Dlážděná Street, which was considered an island of freedom and education during the socialist era; people from the Czechoslovak dissent and underground would gather there. As a result, the then-existing state security started to be interested in Tomáš. Only at a later age, he was able to graduate from a secondary library school, which he studied in the form of distance learning. He was only able to study Theology in the late 1980s. He has been serving as minister in Trutnov since 1999, in the past few years, he has also been working as a Senior in the  Hradec Králové seniorate. He is also an active musician and devotes himself, among other things, to cross-border Czech-German cooperation and reviving our common history. For nineteen years now, he has been in charge of organising the multi-genre “Nine Gates” festival of Czech-German-Jewish culture in the Trutnov region.

Jiří Hofman