JEWISH PRAGUE
On Friday May 15th we were guided around the Jewish area of Prague by a delightful young lady called Katerina who told us so much about the history of each place that I wish I could remember all of it.
Our first stop was the Pinkas Synagogue, established in 1535 by the Horowitz family. It is no longer used as a house of prayer, but was turned into a memorial to the 77,297 Jewish victims of the Nazis from Bohemia and Moravia. Interestingly, this was done by the communists during the mid to late 1950s. The walls inside the building are covered with the names of the victims with dates of birth and
Names of the dead cover the walls
death (when death date is unknown, the date taken is that of departure by train to the death camps.) Seeing so many names, I had to close off my emotions or I’d be overwhelmed by the awful events.
On the end wall of the main hall, are lists of all the camps where prisoners were held until they were sent to the gas chambers, mainly to Auschwitz.
As the Jews were confined to their ghettos, in areas frequently flooded, the synagogue has been under a metre or more of water several times and had to be repaired each time, most recently in 2002. I hadn’t realized that because of a ruling in the Old Testament, one must step down into a synagogue, so of course the chance of flooding is greater. I wonder did Jesus change this rule for Christians?
Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery
was our next stop. A fascinating place, with headstones sticking out of the ground, at odd angles and from a vast array of depths. It has been built up with fresh layers of soil so that now the ground level is about two metres above the earlier level of surrounding walls. Moving the hallowed graves is not allowed so the number of bodies buried here from its beginning in the 15th century is not known. It is not a large area, nothing like our modern cemeteries, but a mature tree that has pushed its way through five or six gravestones, gives some indication of the age and jumble of this place. As we walked around, Katerina pointed out symbols on the stones to show the family name or position in society – a lion, fish, jug etc. Dark stones are the oldest, marble being used more recently although the last gravestone is from 1787.