During World War II, the Nazis and their collaborators routinely destroyed Jewish cemeteries, and in many instances used the headstones as pavement. Ongoing renovations in the Czech capital’s tourist district provides evidence that the Communist government of Czechoslovakia did something similar. Moreover, this didn’t happen during the Czechoslovakian Communist party’s orgy of anti-Semitism in 1952, but far more recently. Robert Tait writes:
Jewish leaders hailed the unearthing as proof of long-held suspicions that the Communist authorities . . . had taken stonework from Jewish burial sites for a much-vaunted pedestrianization of Wenceslas Square during the 1980s. The flagship project was showcased during a walkabout tour by the then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.
The names of the dead are unidentifiable because the headstones have been broken to form cobblestones. One person appears to have died in 1877, when Prague was part of the Habsburg empire, while the most recent death is shown to have happened in the 1970s, during the height of Communism. The stones appear to have been taken from different cemeteries.
Synagogues and cemeteries were allowed to fall into disrepair under an officially sanctioned hostile policy towards religious institutions in general and Judaism in particular, making them vulnerable to looting. František Bányai, the chairman of Prague’s Jewish community, [said that] “more Jewish synagogues were destroyed in the area of the current Czech Republic during Communist times than under the Nazis.”
Read more on Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/05/prague-revamp-reveals-jewish-gravestones-used-to-pave-streets