Murderer of historian of Czech Jewry goes on trial

The trial of Dalibor Škopán, a Czech man accused of murdering Jirí Fiedler, his country’s leading scholar of Jewish history, began in Prague on Tuesday.

Fiedler’s body was found alongside that of his wife, Dagmar, in their Prague apartment in March 2014.

Fiedler, 78, who was not Jewish, began documenting Jewish heritage sites in what is now the Czech Republic in the 1970s, riding his bicycle to remote towns and villages to photo - graph and describe abandoned Jewish cemeteries, former synagogues, rabbis’ homes, Jewish schools, and other sites that stood in ruins or were converted for other use.

His work aroused the suspicion of the authorities, and more than once he was called in by the secret police because of his activities. Only after the fall of communism could Fielder publish his 1992 book Jewish Sites of Bohemia and Moravia . His work was transferred to an electronic database of Jewish heritage in the Czech Republic that is constantly updated.

Škopán, 29, was reported to have confessed to the murders almost immediately, following his February 2015 arrest after a nearly yearlong manhunt. ...