Reform Jewish Community was a religious home to my parents
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Jan Mühlstein was born on 3 July 1949 in Most and he comes from a Jewish family. His parents Robert Mühlstein and Lea Ledererová got to know each other in the mid-1930s. After the Munich Agreement was signed, both Jewish families moved from the borderlands to Prague, and their wedding followed in January 1939. Their plans of emigration were ruined by the arrival of German occupants in March 1939. Unlike most of their relatives, both survived imprisonment in extermination camps, and they lived to be liberated. After the war, Robert Mühlstein participated in the renewal of the Jewish Community in Most and he and his wife raised their children in the Jewish religion. The witness attended grammar schools in Teplice and Liberec and studied at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University in the 1960s. He was active in politics; he was elected a member of the academic committee at the university which organized a student occupation strike in November 1968. In September 1969 he emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany where he finished his university studies. After leaving Czechoslovakia, he was convicted in absentia and faced 16 months in prison as a fugitive. His parents renounced their Czechoslovak citizenship, accepted German citizenship, and were granted permission to move near Munich in 1975 as part of a treaty on mutual relations between Czechoslovakia and the Federal Republic of Germany. The witness worked in the editorial office of a professional publishing house as a journalist in energy management since 1981. He became a founding member and a chairperson of the Liberal Jewish Community Beth Shalom in Munich. At the time of the interview (April 2021), he lived in Munich.
