The first time Ron Kaufman visited Terezin, the site of the notorious "model" prison camp near Prague, he was aghast to find no Jewish symbol memorializing the Jews buried there during World War II.

Last week the San Francisco resident was aghast again when he saw the front page of the Jewish Bulletin. Partially submerged in floodwaters was the Magen David that he and a cousin funded after his 1993 visit.

Only a couple of months earlier, he and his wife, Barbara, proudly posed at the foot of that memorial for a photograph, while visiting Prague with the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation. A $20,000 visitor center, funded by the JCF's Jewish Community Endowment Fund, was also opened in an existing building on the site.

There were Jewish names in the graveyard at Terezin, where Jews were detained on their way to extermination camps, and more than 35,000 died of famine and disease. But following the Holocaust, the only monument there was a gigantic cross.

The ghetto was a mockup for the benefit of outsiders, with detainees appearing to receive good treatment. But what visitors actually saw before them was only part of a continuous transient flow. Most Jews stayed only briefly at Terezin before being packed into cattle cars bound for death camps.

Obviously the Nazis would not have commemorated Jews, nor the communists after, "so there we were in 1993" with no memorial. "It was just outrageous," said Kaufman, a former JCF president.

But in June as the Kaufmans stood under the memorial -- sculpted by a Czech artist from actual railroad tracks used to take Jews to death camps -- they faced "row after row of grave markers the size of a football field" and felt satisfied to finally see the land appropriately identified.

"It was quite emotional," admitted Kaufman. "It should have happened long ago."

Kaufman further examined the photograph in the Bulletin, taken by Jewish Telegraphic Agency photographer Ivan Babej, and pointed out that the men in the canoe are actually floating over the graveyard and a stone wall with a commemorative plaque near the sculpture. The photo stirred strong emotions, he explained, especially due to the sculpture's "strong San Francisco roots."

Mark Reisbaum, director of grants for the JCEF, said the ties between San Francisco and the Czech Republic will be preserved.

He said the endowment fund will continue to work in partnership with the Washington, D.C.-based Project Judaica to raise money to restore synagogues and memorials damaged by the flooding in Prague -- the continent's worst in more than 100 years.

In Prague's Pinkas synagogue the names of Holocaust victims were eroded from walls, and water levels hit nearly seven feet. The Old-New Synagogue took in four feet of water, covering pews and damaging the building.

Initial damage estimates for Jewish sites totaled more than $4 million, said Reisbaum. Apart from the Terezin memorial being "significantly under water," he was unsure as of yet how severe the damage was.

"A group of endowment fund leaders were just there this summer," he said, "and a couple months later the streets they walked on are filled with mud. It makes it all the more relevant to us."