Discover the history of the Jewish Quarter, known as Josefof, with our Prague Jewish Quarter Walking Tour, during which you will know the history of its citizens and its most famous places.
The neighborhood is named after King Joseph II who abolished discriminatory laws; it is delimited by an external wall, inside which there were wooden houses, synagogues and the famous cemetery.
The Jewish cemetery was built in 1478 and was used until 1787 and to date has more than 12,000 tombstones. On the tombs you will see small pebbles resting, a tribute to the dead left by visitors to the sacred place.
Near the cemetery is the Pinkas Synagogue, one of the most important places of worship in the Jewish quarter. It is a memorial created to remember the victims of the Holocaust, never to forget the atrocities suffered. Going up to the first floor you can see a permanent exhibition in which the drawings of Jewish children deported to concentration camps are exhibited: they are not simple sheets of paper but they are the expression of fear, of pain, but also of dreams and hope in the future. Looking at how they represented this world of horrors through the eyes of a child will be a gut punch.
Here is one of the first synagogues in Europe is the Old-New Synagogue, the oldest in Prague, built around 1270. According to tradition, it was built with the blocks of the great sanctuary of Jerusalem, destroyed during the conquest by the hand of the Roman emperor Titus. Legend has it that the mysterious Golem creature would hide in his attic.
A few steps from the Old-New Synagogue you will see the Old City Hall. The building, which houses the council of the Jewish communities of the Czech Republic, is one of the symbols of the neighborhood for its historical value but above all for its particular clock, or rather its clocks: on the facade there are in fact two clocks, one classic with the Arabic numerals, the other with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and, since the Hebrew language is read from right to left, the clock hands also turn counterclockwise.
Inside the neighborhood there is also the Spanish Synagogue, a small jewel of Moorish-style architecture, built in the second half of the 19th century.
Not far from the Spanish synagogue, the statue of Kafka was erected, a tribute to the great writer of the twentieth century who spent his childhood in this district of the city.
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