Monumental

19. Oktober 2010

Since most museums are closed on Mondays, I thought that it would be a good day to visit the Jewish Quarter of Prague. The Jewish Museum there is organized into a tour of several synagogues, which house displays about Jewish culture and Czech Jewish history, and a path winding through the old Jewish cemetery. The Jewish cemetery alone is quite impressive with 12,000 headstones and many more graves which are unaccounted for. It was used from the 15th to the 18th century and since the cemetery couldn’t get any bigger, they just kept adding new layers of dirt and graves on top of the old ones, causing the headstones to keep being pushed upwards, creating the picturesque wall-to-wall headstones leaning every which way onto each other that you see today.

In the Pinkas synagogue you can see more than 77,000 names written on the walls. These are the known names of all the Jews just from Prague and the surrounding areas who were murdered in the Holocaust. The impact that had on me was monumental; when you hear “77,000,” you realize it’s a large number, but you have no real way of quantifying it. Seeing those names of real men, women and children, of families, there gave me a lurching feeling in my stomach. I just can’t fathom housing so much hatred for other people within me.

The historical and cultural information in the other synagogues was interesting, and it was interspersed with intricately designed artifacts. Jewish people have such rich culture and traditions, and I enjoyed learning about them. I had no idea how many the implements are associated with displaying the Torah properly, not to mention the various special dress customs and traditional food. I also never realized the full extent of continual Jewish persecutions throughout history. It leaves me with an indescribable ache to know that there has been so much intolerance.

The synagogues were all beautifully decorated, but the Spanish Synagogue with its intricate wall-to-wall decorations and motifs is certainly a standout. The decoration was dark green and red with gold interspersed, so the contrast between light and dark was quite striking. I would highly recommend the museum trip because besides being a place of beauty, history and emotion, I think that a trip to Prague without visiting the Jewish Museum would be a trip that would be missing a piece essential to understanding the city itself.

After I finished at the museum, I meandered through the streets and needed up at Old Town Square. I saw yet another National Museum building (they are all over, and I wish desperately to visit all of them!), the church near the square and the city hall with the Astronomical clock. At the top of every hour, the clock comes to life. The figures on the outside move and the windows open and other figures rotate behind them. I’ve always been a fan of clocks with moving parts, so I thought it was neat. I wandered around the streets some more and had a Döner with cheese of course and some ice cream before catching the metro home for the evening.

Deine,
N*