Wherever you go, there's always something Jewish

On Friday morning, I had a small group tour arranged for Avi and me to see the Jewish Quarter with a knowledgeable guide. With my kosher bakery croissant in hand, I followed Jewish Czech guide Barbora with a young Canadian couple and a pair of older Americans through the windy streets of Prague’s old ghetto. Jews have been in Prague on record as early as the 900s. The first synagogue was built in 1280, and a pogrom occurred there less than 30 years later. The Jews were relegated to the most flooded land by the river, with a tiny plot of land where houses were built on top of one another as the community tried to cram dozens of thousands of people into an area smaller than Scarsdale Village.

We saw the Old New Synagogue, the Spanish Synagogue, the Maisels Synagogue, the Pinchas Synagogue, and the Klausen Synagogue, plus the Jewish Cemetery. Here are the short facts on each, plus my reactions:

Old New: Cool to stand where people have prayed since 1280, with vaulted ceilings and cryptic Hebrew messages on walls. The Womens section is a gallery to the side, with tiny window slits women clamor over to get a glimpse of whats happening. Historic, but not a good spiritual environment for the egalitarian within me. I can’t really blame them, it was 1280, but now its 2013 and this isn’t my scene.

Spanish Synagogue: Two words I love! This reform shul from the 1800s is the first and only of Prague. While it’s designed in a Moorish style, the garish golden geometric patterns and the huge organ make it feel like more of a concert hall than a sanctuary. Here, Barbora explained Emperor Josef’s decree that Jews change their names to standard convention firsty-lasties because he couldn’t keep track of which Moishe ben Avraham had paid his taxes. When the names were changed, people picked pretty names like Rosenzweig (rosebud), and sometimes the names were picked for them, like Kleinman (little man). Barbora literally explained over 50 names, from the Goldsteins to the Silverbergs – probably the majority of people I know can trace their families to this name change.

Maisels: No longer in use, the space is more of a traditional open sanctuary, now converted into an artifact museum. It has some cool things like the cloak of a guy who thought he was the messiah, a funny hat the government used to make the Jews wear that ended up becoming the community symbol, and some preserved prayer books from the 1500s.

Pinkas: A former community yeshiva founded by a wealthy Czech philanthropist, the space now has the names, birth and last record dates of Czech Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust. Think of a sizeable chapel with floor-to-ceiling inscriptions in tiny scribed print detailing all of these names, giving life to the countless multitudes who were silenced by evil. It’s an overwhelming place, as I frantically searched through towns, alphabetically, for anyone who might have been related to me. Upstairs, children’s paintings from Terezin transit camp, north of Prague, are housed. An art teacher risked saving these children’s works in two suitcases under camp floorboards before going with them to Auschwitz, providing her students some sort of support on their last transport.

Klausen: An exhibition hall for holidays and occasions, there are menorahs and megillahs and that kind of stuff. I was pretty synagogued out at this point.

To say the least, I was ready to move away from this haunted and eerie quadrant of the city and headed across the river for lunch.