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Wednesday May 27, 2009
We decided to take a Prague Guided Walk through the Jewish Ghetto on our last day in town. Roman Bily led the group from Old Town Square into the former Jewish Quarter. Roman was incredibly knowledgeable and shared a lot of medieval and recent history.
Jews have been persecuted in this region in an ebb and flow for about 1000 years. We learned about Franz Kafka and saw how the Jewish Quarter (Josefov) is demarcated on the street signs in Prague. 
We saw King Solomon's Glatt Kosher Restaurant and noted that they proudly boasted Michelle Obama's recent visit. She's quoted on their front window: "It was a wonderful visit but much too short. 'I'll be back'". 
The cemetery in the Jewish Ghetto was especially impressive. The residents crammed nearly 100,000 bodies in a 1 km x 1 km space. The bodies are buried up to 12 layers deep!
This statue is rumored to promote fertility by simply touching the lion's stomach.
We learned about how the Jewish population in Prague was decimated in World War II and how it never recovered afterward. Less than 5,000 Jews live in the Czech Republic with a large fraction located in Prague. We visited the Old New Synagogue, the oldest synagogue in Europe that is still actively used. 
The most haunting site of all was in the Pinkas Synagogue. The names of the 80,000 Jews that were killed in the Holocaust from Moravia and Bohemia are hand-printed onto the wall. Upstairs, the Synagogue featured drawings created by children in the Terezin concentration camp and depicted the realities of life during that time. Link to next post