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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (30136)	2/17/2004 2:35:45 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793928

Tiny Czech town rooting for Kerry victory in U.S. February 17, 2004 BY KAREL JANICEK HORNI BENESOV, Czech Republic -- American presidential politics don't normally cause much of a stir in this corner of the Czech Republic. But revelations that John Kerry's grandfather was born here have mesmerized the mountain town. Suddenly, Horni Benesov's 2,400 people can't get enough of the Democratic front-runner's quest for the White House or his Czech ancestor, an ethnic German Jew who fled rising anti-Semitism for Chicago at the turn of the last century. If the Massachusetts senator clinches his party's nomination, Mayor Josef Klech is ready to offer Kerry a more obscure post -- honorary citizen of this former mining town in the northeastern Czech Republic's Jeseniky mountains. ''We're keeping our fingers crossed for him,'' Klech said. Word of Kerry's Czech connection first surfaced last year, when an Austrian genealogist hired by the Boston Globe discovered that the candidate's paternal grandfather, Frederick A. Kerry, was born in Horni Benesov as Fritz Kohn in 1873. The news reportedly astonished Kerry, a Catholic, and it sent a thrill through the town 175 miles east of Prague, whose history dates to 1253. Two townsfolk thought the tale so fantastic, they accused the mayor of making it up. ''We were taken by surprise,'' Klech said. ''Who could expect that?'' Today, there's nothing left to suggest Jews ever lived here: no synagogue, no traces of Jewish tombstones. Fritz Kohn, a son of Benedikt Kohn and his wife, Mathilde, once worked in the local brewery. Czech government archives reveal that Fritz Kohn changed his name to Frederick Kerry on March 17, 1902, and emigrated to the United States three years later. Tomas Jelinek, the leader of Prague's Jewish community, said many Jews left for the United States at the time to seek a better life and to escape anti-Semitism. Kerry first settled in Chicago before moving to Boston, where his wife, Ida, gave birth to John Kerry's father, Richard, in 1915. Frederick Kerry, apparently despondent over mounting debts, fatally shot himself in the head in 1921. The Kohn family house is gone, and the remains of the brewery are now a public sauna. At the end of the 19th century, Horni Benesov was a lively mining town and textile industry center. The town's 5,000 citizens, mostly ethnic Germans, knew the town by its German name, Bennisch. Shortly after World War II, about 3 million ethnic Germans were expelled from then-Czechoslovakia and had their property confiscated. They were considered enemies of the Czechs and Slovaks because many had supported Adolf Hitler. Their exodus, and the arrival of Czech newcomers, meant there was virtually no information about Horni Benesov and its past. All that survived was a book of the town's photographs from 1937, which contains a picture of Kerry's grandfather's house. AP