Six synagogues, a cemetery with twelve layers of graves, and a collection that exists because the Nazis intended to make a museum of an exterminated people.
Why the collection exists
This is the part to understand before anything else.
Prague’s Jewish community is documented from the tenth century and was for long periods the largest in Europe. During the occupation, the Nazis shipped Judaica from destroyed communities across Bohemia and Moravia to Prague, with the stated intention of assembling a museum of an extinct race once the extermination was complete.
The community that survived inherited a collection assembled for that purpose. Roughly 80,000 Czech and Moravian Jews were murdered.
That is what the Jewish Museum is, and it is why the tone of visiting it is different from other museums.
The sites
The Old Jewish Cemetery is the one people come for. In use from the early fifteenth century to 1787, on a plot the community was never allowed to expand, so the dead were buried in layers — up to twelve deep, with earth added and older stones raised. Around 12,000 headstones lean against each other above perhaps 100,000 burials. Rabbi Löw, associated with the Golem legend, is buried here and his tomb carries pebbles and paper notes.
The Pinkas Synagogue is the memorial. The walls of the interior are covered, by hand, with the names of the 77,297 Czech and Moravian Jews killed in the Holocaust — name, date of birth, date of death. The names were painted in the 1950s, erased by the communist authorities in 1968, and repainted after 1989. Upstairs are the drawings made by children at Terezín.
The Spanish Synagogue, Moorish Revival, is the most spectacular interior — every surface gilded and patterned.
The Maisel and Klausen synagogues hold the history and the ritual objects.
The Old-New Synagogue, from around 1270, is the oldest active synagogue in Europe and still holds services. Separate ticket. The Golem is supposed to lie in its attic, which is not accessible.
Practical
One combined ticket covers the Jewish Museum sites; the Old-New Synagogue is separate, and there is a combined option.
Men are asked to cover their heads in the synagogues; paper kippot are provided.
No photography in several of the sites, and the Pinkas Synagogue in particular. This is enforced and it should be.
Closed on Saturdays and Jewish holidays.
Two to three hours to do it properly. It is emotionally heavy and there is nowhere inside to sit and recover — plan something quiet afterwards.
The quarter itself
The medieval ghetto was almost entirely demolished between 1893 and 1913 in a slum clearance, and what replaced it is the Art Nouveau apartment blocks of Pařížská, now the most expensive shopping street in the country. The synagogues and the cemetery survive as islands in it.
That contrast — luxury retail wrapped around a cemetery — is jarring, and it is the actual shape of the place.
More History
St Vitus Cathedral
Six hundred years under construction and finished in 1929, with a Mucha window, the Bohemian crown jewels behind seven locks, and Wenceslas's chapel.
Vyšehrad
A fortress on a rock above the Vltava, older than the castle in legend and younger in fact, with the national cemetery and almost no tourists.
Strahov Monastery Library
Two baroque library halls of painted ceilings and gilded shelving, and a cabinet of curiosities including two whale penises and a narwhal tusk sold as a unicorn horn.