ARTSCHUL Prague, formerly the Robert Guttmann Gallery, is an exhibition space of the Jewish Museum in Prague. It is located at U Staré školy 3, in Josefov, the former Jewish Town of Prague, close to the Spanish Synagogue.

The name ARTSCHUL connects the gallery with the memory of the Altschul, the Old School or Old Shul. According to the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Altschul stood in this area from the early thirteenth century until 1686 and is the first reliably documented synagogue in Prague.

ARTSCHUL and the Altschul Memory

The topography of the surrounding street preserves this older layer of Jewish Prague. U Staré školy means “At the Old School”. The same street was formerly known in German and Yiddish as Altschulgasse.

This name is important because the modern gallery belongs to a place already marked by one of the earliest documented institutions of Jewish communal life in Prague. The present function is museological and educational, but the name ARTSCHUL deliberately recalls the older synagogue landscape of Josefov.

Robert Guttmann and the Gallery

The gallery was originally named after Robert Guttmann, a Prague Jewish painter associated with naïve art, Zionist circles and the visual memory of Jewish Prague. Guttmann was born in 1880, deported from Prague to the Łódź ghetto on 16 October 1941, and murdered there on 14 March 1942.

The Robert Guttmann Gallery opened in 2001 as a modern exhibition venue of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Its first exhibition was dedicated to Guttmann’s work and presented paintings, drawings, photographs, manuscripts and archival material connected with his life.

Museum Collections and Reconstruction

The venue covers about 80 square metres and was designed for short-term exhibitions from the museum’s collections. Its controlled light, temperature and humidity conditions allow the display of sensitive materials, including parchments, old printed books, historic textiles and works on paper.

The gallery has presented exhibitions on Jewish life, the persecution of Bohemian and Moravian Jews during the Second World War, Jewish monuments in the Czech Republic and Jewish themes in contemporary visual art.

The Jewish Museum has listed the space as closed for reconstruction. After renovation, ARTSCHUL Prague is planned to function as a gallery and educational centre for short-term exhibitions from the museum’s collections.

The Spanish Synagogue stands in Josefov, the former Jewish Town of Prague, near Dušní Street and the Church of the Holy Spirit. It is the most recent synagogue built in the historic Jewish Town and today one of the main sites of the Jewish Museum in Prague.

From the Old Shul to the Spanish Synagogue

The site is older than the present building. The Spanish Synagogue was built on the place of the Old Shul, also known as the Altschul, which was regarded as the oldest Jewish house of worship in the Prague ghetto. The Old Shul was demolished in 1867.

In 1835, the first Society for Regulated Worship in accordance with the Viennese rite was founded in Prague’s Old Shul. This marked an important stage in the religious and cultural transformation of Jewish Prague during the nineteenth century.

The new synagogue was commissioned in 1867-1868 by the Society for Regulated Worship among the Israelites in Prague. It was designed by Vojtěch Ignác Ullmann and Josef Niklas, with Jan Bělský responsible for construction.

Its name does not mean that the synagogue belonged to a Sephardic community or followed the Sephardic rite. The name “Spanish Synagogue” refers to its Moorish Revival decoration, inspired by Islamic-period architecture in Spain, especially the Alhambra.

Architecture and Reform Worship

The Spanish Synagogue expresses the nineteenth-century transformation of Jewish Prague. A medieval synagogue site was replaced by a modern urban synagogue connected to Reform worship, galleries, music, an organ and a new architectural language.

The former Old Shul was also associated with František Škroup, composer of the Czech national anthem, who served there as choirmaster between 1835 and 1845.

The richly decorated interior was completed between 1882 and 1883 by Antonín Baum and Bedřich Münzberger. The synagogue has a square ground plan, a large central dome, built-in galleries and an Aron ha-Kodesh, the Torah ark, shaped like a mihrab-like niche. Its interior combines polychrome decoration, gilding, stained glass and ornamental stucco arabesques.

In 1935, a Functionalist annex was added beside the Spanish Synagogue, based on a design by Karel Pecánek. The extension included a vestibule and an upper-floor winter prayer room connected to the synagogue. It was also used by the Jewish community as a hospital before the Second World War.

The Spanish Synagogue and the Jewish Museum

During the Second World War, the Spanish Synagogue was used as a warehouse for items confiscated from synagogues in Bohemia and Moravia. Its wartime role belongs to the wider history of the Jewish Museum in Prague and the Central Jewish Museum, where liturgical objects, books and archival documents from Jewish communities were gathered under Nazi control.

In 1955, the Spanish Synagogue came under the care of the State Jewish Museum. Its interior was reconstructed in 1958-1959, and an exhibition of synagogue textiles opened there in 1960. The building later fell into neglect and was closed in 1982. Its full reconstruction took place after the fall of the Communist regime, and the synagogue reopened in 1998.

Today, the Spanish Synagogue houses the permanent exhibition Jews in the Bohemian Lands, 19th-20th Centuries. The exhibition presents Jewish emancipation, the Czech-Jewish movement, Zionism, the Hilsner Affair, the urban renewal of the Jewish Town, the Holocaust and the post-war renewal of Jewish life.

The exhibition also presents figures connected to modern Jewish culture in Central Europe, including Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud and Gustav Mahler. Among its displayed objects are a Hanukkah menorah from 1785 with a portrait of Emperor Joseph II and material documenting Jewish monuments in Bohemia and Moravia.

The Ceremonial Hall stands beside the Old Jewish Cemetery and the Klausen Synagogue in Josefov, the former Jewish Town of Prague. It belonged to the Prague Jewish Burial Society, the Hevra Kadisha, one of the most important communal institutions of Jewish Prague.

Prague Hevra Kadisha

The Prague Hevra Kadisha was founded in 1564 by Rabbi Eliezer Ashkenazi. Its statutes were later revised by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, and became influential for burial societies across Ashkenazi Europe.

The society was responsible for visiting the sick, caring for the dying, purifying the body, organizing burial and supporting the rituals of mourning. Within this framework, burial was not only a practical duty. It was a communal act governed by dignity, discipline and religious responsibility.

Ceremonial Hall and Burial Practice

The present Ceremonial Hall was built between 1906 and 1908, on the grounds of the Old Jewish Cemetery. It was designed by Jan Gerstl and Alois Gabriel in a Neo-Romanesque style. Although the building appears medieval at first sight, it belongs to the early twentieth century and reflects the historicist architecture of that period.

The building was created for the final services connected to burial. Its basement contained a mortuary, from which funeral processions departed for the New Jewish Cemetery. The hall was also equipped with one of the first technical elevators in Prague.

The most important ritual associated with the building was taharah, the purification of the body before burial. In Jewish funerary practice, taharah forms part of a broader system of care toward the dead, carried out by the burial society before interment.

The Ceremonial Hall stood at the edge of the Old Jewish Cemetery, where burials had ended in 1787. Its location preserved a physical link between the old burial ground of Prague’s Jewish community and the later funerary system that led to the New Jewish Cemetery.

The building served its original funerary purpose only until the beginning of the 1920s. In 1926, the Prague Burial Society leased the Ceremonial Hall to the Jewish Museum in Prague. The museum opened its first exhibition there, transforming a former funerary building into a museum space while preserving its connection to burial customs and communal memory.

Museum, War and Reconstruction

During the Nazi occupation, the Jewish Museum Association was abolished in 1939. In 1942, the Central Jewish Museum was created under Nazi control. The Nazi authorities approved the project for their own purposes, but Jewish museum workers used the institution to preserve liturgical objects, books and archival records from Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia that were being dismantled and destroyed.

Objects connected to the Prague Burial Society entered the museum collections during this period. Among them was a major series of paintings showing the work of the Burial Society, including visiting the hospital, praying by the deathbed, shrouding the body, washing the corpse, making the coffin, digging the grave, carrying the coffin, lowering the coffin into the grave and consoling the bereaved.

After the war, the museum came under state administration and was nationalized in 1950. The Ceremonial Hall continued to function as part of the State Jewish Museum’s exhibition system under the Communist regime.

In 1994, after the fall of Communism, the Jewish Museum in Prague regained independence from the state. Its buildings were returned to the Prague Jewish community, and most of its collections were returned to the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic.

From 1997 to 2024, the Ceremonial Hall housed an exhibition dedicated to Jewish burial customs. The exhibition focused on illness, death, taharah, burial, memorial prayers, Jewish cemeteries and the internal life of burial societies.

The display included material connected to the Prague Burial Society, illuminated manuscripts, silver alms boxes, fragments of medieval tombstones, memorial prayers and images of the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague.

In July 2024, the Ceremonial Hall entered a new phase of reconstruction. The Jewish Museum in Prague announced a restoration project planned through the second half of 2026, with new exhibitions dedicated to Jewish funerary culture, the Burial Society and the urban transformation of Josefov.

The Klausen Synagogue stands beside the Old Jewish Cemetery in Josefov, the former Jewish Town of Prague. It is the largest surviving synagogue of the former Prague ghetto and the only preserved example of early Baroque synagogue architecture in this part of the city.

From the Klausen to the Baroque synagogue

The importance of the site begins before the present building. In the sixteenth century, three smaller buildings stood here, known as the Klausen. The name refers to earlier enclosed or separate spaces used for study, prayer and communal functions. One of them was a yeshiva, a Talmudic school, associated with Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague.

This means that the place was already connected to rabbinic study and Jewish learning before the Baroque synagogue was built. Its position beside the Old Jewish Cemetery also placed it close to one of the most sensitive communal spaces of the Prague Jewish Town.

In 1689, a major fire devastated the Prague ghetto and destroyed the earlier Klausen buildings. After the fire, the community rebuilt the site as a larger synagogue. The present Klausen Synagogue was completed in 1694 in the early Baroque style.

The new building became the largest synagogue in Prague’s Jewish Town. It was also the second main synagogue of the Prague Jewish community, after the Old-New Synagogue. Several prominent Prague rabbis served there, which shows that the building had a central communal role and was not merely a local prayer hall.

Klausen Synagogue and the Prague Burial Society

The Klausen Synagogue was closely connected to the Prague Burial Society, the Chevra Kadisha. Because the building stood next to the Old Jewish Cemetery, the Burial Society used it as a place of prayer. This gave the synagogue a specific role in the religious life surrounding illness, death, burial and memorial practice.

The nearby Ceremonial Hall later continued this funerary association. Built between 1906 and 1908, it served the Prague Burial Society and was later used by the Jewish Museum in Prague for exhibitions on Jewish burial customs. Together, the synagogue, cemetery and Ceremonial Hall formed one of the clearest surviving spatial connections between prayer, burial care and communal memory in Josefov.

The Klausen Synagogue survived the large-scale redevelopment of Josefov at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when much of the old Jewish Town was demolished. Its survival preserved one of the major religious buildings of early modern Prague Jewry, together with the Old-New, Pinkas, Maisel and Spanish synagogues.

The Jewish Museum and the Nazi occupation

The Jewish Museum in Prague was founded in 1906 by Salomon Hugo Lieben and August Stein. Its early collection included objects from synagogues demolished during the clearance of the Prague Jewish ghetto.

During the Nazi occupation, the museum entered a different and deeply violent historical context. The Jewish Museum Association was abolished in 1939, after the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Its collections were taken over by the Prague Jewish community. In 1942, the Central Jewish Museum was created under Nazi occupation.

The Nazi authorities approved the project for their own purposes. However, Jewish museum workers used it to preserve liturgical objects, books and archival records from Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia that were being dismantled, deported and destroyed.

In 1943, the Klausen Synagogue was used as an exhibition space of the wartime Central Jewish Museum. Displays there dealt with Jewish festivals, ceremonies and the course of life, including birth, wedding and death. Another exhibition presented works of modern art from the museum’s collection.

This wartime use gives the Klausen Synagogue a specific place in the history of the Jewish Museum in Prague. While Jews from the Czech lands were being deported and murdered, the synagogue became part of a forced museum structure in which Jewish objects and traditions were classified, displayed and preserved under Nazi control.

Jewish customs, renovation and present status

After the war, the museum came under state administration. In 1950, it was nationalized by the Communist regime. The Klausen Synagogue continued to function within the State Jewish Museum’s exhibition system.

For decades, the Klausen Synagogue housed the exhibition Jewish Customs and Traditions. It used ritual objects, manuscripts and ceremonial material to explain synagogue worship, Jewish holidays, the Jewish home and the course of life, including birth, circumcision, adulthood, marriage and divorce. Together with the Ceremonial Hall, it also presented illness, death, burial, memorial prayers, tombstone fragments and objects connected to burial societies.

In 1994, after the fall of Communism, the Jewish Museum in Prague regained independence from the state. Its buildings were returned to the Prague Jewish community, and most of its collections were returned to the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic.

In July 2024, the long-standing exhibition was removed as part of a wider redevelopment of the museum circuit. The Klausen Synagogue and the Ceremonial Hall then entered a period of renovation and exhibition renewal. The museum has announced that the Klausen Synagogue is expected to reopen by 2028 at the latest, with a new core exhibition on Jewish customs and traditions. In the meantime, the building has also been used for special occasions and temporary exhibitions.

The Klausen Synagogue should therefore be understood through five connected layers: the sixteenth-century Klausen and yeshiva, the Baroque synagogue built after the fire of 1689, its role as a prayer space of the Prague Burial Society, its wartime use within the Central Jewish Museum, and its modern function as part of the Jewish Museum in Prague.

The Old Jewish Cemetery Prague is located in Josefov, the former Jewish Town of Prague, beside the Pinkas Synagogue and close to the Old-New Synagogue. It is one of the oldest surviving Jewish burial grounds in Europe and one of the most important material records of Jewish life in Prague.

The cemetery was probably established in the first half of the fifteenth century. Its exact foundation date is not known. The oldest preserved tombstone belongs to Rabbi and poet Avigdor Kara, also known as Avigdor Karo, and is dated 1439.

The Old Jewish Cemetery Prague as a burial ground

From the fifteenth century onward, the cemetery became the main burial ground of the Jewish community of Prague. It served this function for more than three centuries, until burials there ended in 1787.

Its unusual appearance is the result of restricted space inside the Jewish Town and the religious prohibition against disturbing graves. When no more room was available, layers of earth were added above older burials. New tombstones were then placed on the higher surface, while earlier graves remained below.

For this reason, the cemetery contains several burial layers. According to some researchers, the burials may reach up to ten levels deep. More than 12,000 tombstones survive above ground, but the number of people buried there is much higher.

The stones preserve Hebrew inscriptions, dates, family names, professions, symbols and references to communal status. Earlier tombstones are generally simpler. Later seventeenth- and eighteenth-century monuments often include richer decoration, relief lettering and symbolic imagery.

Rabbis, scholars and communal leaders

The cemetery records the history of Prague’s Jewish elite, including scholars, printers, physicians, rabbis and communal leaders. Mordecai Maisel, one of the great benefactors of the Jewish Town, enlarged the cemetery in the late sixteenth century by purchasing adjoining property. He died in 1601 and was buried there.

Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the Maharal of Prague, died in 1609 and was also buried in the cemetery. His grave became one of the most visited places in the site, connected to his religious and philosophical writings and to later traditions surrounding the Golem of Prague.

Other major figures buried in the cemetery include David Gans, who died in 1613. He was a Jewish historian, mathematician and astronomer connected to the intellectual world of Rudolfine Prague. David Oppenheim, who died in 1736, was Chief Rabbi of Prague and an important collector of Hebrew manuscripts and books. His library later became part of the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

From Josefov to the Jewish Museum in Prague

After burials in the Old Jewish Cemetery ended in 1787, the main burial activity of the Prague Jewish community shifted to Žižkov. A Jewish cemetery had already been established there in 1680 as a plague burial ground. It continued in use until 1890, when the New Žižkov Jewish Cemetery opened at the Olšany Cemeteries.

At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Josefov underwent major urban redevelopment. Much of the old Jewish Town was demolished. However, the Old Jewish Cemetery survived, together with several synagogues and communal buildings that later became central to the Jewish Museum in Prague.

The Jewish Museum in Prague was founded in 1906 by Salomon Hugo Lieben and August Stein. Its early collection was formed from objects preserved from synagogues demolished during the clearance of the Prague Jewish ghetto. The cemetery itself remained a burial ground and historical monument, not a museum building, but it later became part of the preserved ensemble of Jewish monuments in Josefov.

During the Nazi occupation, the Jewish Museum Association was abolished, and the museum’s collections were taken over by the Prague Jewish community. In 1942, the Central Jewish Museum was created. Although approved by the Nazi authorities for their own purposes, it preserved liturgical objects, books and archival documents from destroyed Jewish communities during the war.

After the war, the museum came under state control and was nationalized in 1950. It remained restricted under the Communist regime. In 1994, after the fall of Communism, the Jewish Museum in Prague regained independence from the state, and its buildings and collections were returned to Jewish communal ownership and administration.

Today, the Old Jewish Cemetery Prague is part of the Prague Jewish Town circuit of the Jewish Museum in Prague. It is visitable together with the historic synagogues and exhibitions of Josefov, preserving the burial record of Prague’s Jewish community from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.

The Pinkas Synagogue stands on Široká Street, beside the Old Jewish Cemetery in Josefov, the former Jewish Town of Prague. After the Old-New Synagogue, the Pinkas Synagogue is one of the oldest surviving synagogues of Prague’s Jewish Town.

Early history of the Pinkas Synagogue

A small house of worship already existed on this site before 1492, in the building known as the Coats of Arms House. In 1535, the site was rebuilt and expanded by Aaron Meshulam Horowitz, one of the leading figures of the Prague Jewish community.

A commemorative inscription in the vestibule records the construction of the synagogue in the Jewish year 5295, corresponding to 1535. The building originally functioned as a private house of worship connected to the Horowitz family. Its name is usually linked to Israel Pinkas, an earlier owner of the property.

Architecturally, the synagogue combines late Gothic and early Renaissance features. The main nave preserves a late Gothic reticulated vault, while the entrance portal belongs to the early Renaissance. In the early seventeenth century, Judah de Herz added the women’s gallery, vestibule and entrance hall.

The synagogue was repeatedly affected by floods. After flood damage in 1860, the floor of the main hall was raised by about 1.5 metres. This intervention covered earlier levels and changed the proportions of the interior.

During the urban redevelopment of Josefov at the turn of the twentieth century, many old buildings around the synagogue were demolished. The Pinkas Synagogue survived, but the surrounding ground level was raised, leaving the building lower than the modern street level.

Nazi occupation and postwar transformation

During the Nazi occupation and the Second World War, the synagogue was no longer functioning as a normal communal house of prayer. A photograph from 1943 shows the emptied interior being used as a warehouse or repository. This was before the creation of the Shoah memorial.

After the war, the Pinkas Synagogue came under the care of the Jewish Museum in Prague. In the 1950s, a historical and architectural survey was carried out. Restoration work removed nineteenth-century backfill from the main nave, restored the original height and layout of the hall, and uncovered the original bimah.

The idea then emerged to transform the synagogue into a symbolic gravestone for the Jewish victims of the Shoah from the Czech lands. Under the direction of Hana Volavková, the first postwar director of the Jewish Museum in Prague, the memorial was designed by the Czech artists Václav Boštík and Jiří John.

The work was completed in 1959 and opened to the public in 1960. The interior walls were inscribed with the names of almost 80,000 Jewish victims from Bohemia and Moravia. The names were arranged according to the victims’ last place of residence before arrest or deportation, and then listed alphabetically.

The inscriptions were compiled from transport papers, registration lists, survivor accounts and postwar card indexes. Where the exact date of death was unknown, the memorial used the date of deportation to ghettos or extermination camps, often the last known trace of the person.

On both sides of the Aron ha-Kodesh, the Holy Ark, the memorial lists the names of ghettos and death camps to which Jews from Bohemia and Moravia were deported.

Closure, restoration and documentation

In 1968, during restoration work, a historical mikveh was discovered in the basement of the building next to the synagogue. The ritual bath is usually dated to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century and is one of the important physical traces of Jewish settlement in this part of Prague.

After the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Communist authorities did not restore the memorial to its original state. The Pinkas Memorial remained closed for more than twenty years, and acts of remembrance were rarely possible there.

After the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, restoration of the memorial became possible. The inscriptions were restored according to the original design of Boštík and John, and the work was completed in 1995. The memorial reopened to the public in 1996.

The synagogue was damaged again during the floods of 2002, when water reached the walls and affected the inscriptions. The building was restored and reopened in 2003.

Today, the Pinkas Synagogue functions as the Memorial to the Victims of the Shoah from the Czech Lands. It also houses the exhibition Children’s Drawings from the Terezín Ghetto, 1942-1944, based on the Jewish Museum in Prague’s collection of drawings made by children imprisoned in Terezín.

The Jewish Museum’s Shoah Documentation Department continues to verify, correct and expand the information connected to the memorial, through databases, archival records and family documentation.

The Maisel Synagogue stands on Maiselova Street, in Josefov, the former Jewish Town of Prague. It is one of the historic synagogues of Prague and is today part of the Jewish Museum in Prague.

Mordecai Maisel and Renaissance Prague

The Maisel Synagogue was founded by Mordecai ben Samuel Maisel, one of the leading Jewish figures of Prague in the late sixteenth century. Maisel was a financier, merchant, court Jew, community leader and benefactor of the Jewish Town during the reign of Emperor Rudolf II.

In 1591, Rudolf II granted Maisel a special privilege allowing him to build a private synagogue. Construction took place between 1590 and 1592, under Judah Tzoref de Herz and Josef Wahl. The synagogue was ceremonially opened on Simchat Torah in 1592.

The original building was a large Renaissance prayer house with three naves, twenty pillars and women’s side aisles. For about a century, it was one of the largest and most prominent buildings in the Prague ghetto. Jewish memory associated it with Maisel’s wealth, his social position and his role as a builder of the Jewish Town.

Maisel’s importance was not limited to this synagogue. He used his fortune to support communal institutions, charity, education and public works. His patronage was connected to the Jewish Town Hall, the High Synagogue, public baths, an alms-house, communal buildings and the paving of streets in the Jewish Town.

After Maisel’s death in 1601, his estate became the object of confiscation and long legal disputes. The synagogue, which he had intended for the Prague Jewish community, was also caught within these conflicts over inheritance, imperial privilege and communal ownership.

Fire, reconstruction and the redevelopment of Josefov

The Maisel Synagogue was severely damaged in the great fire of the Prague ghetto in 1689. Its vaulting collapsed, and the building was later shortened and rebuilt. Further alterations followed in the nineteenth century.

The original Renaissance form did not survive. The present Neo-Gothic appearance belongs mainly to the redevelopment of the Jewish Town at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Josefov was transformed through large-scale urban clearance and reconstruction.

Within this altered urban setting, the Maisel Synagogue lost the dominant position it had held in the older ghetto. Even so, the building remained one of the main material references to the early modern Jewish Town and to the memory of Mordecai Maisel.

Maisel Synagogue and the Jewish Museum in Prague

During the Second World War, the Maisel Synagogue was used by the Nazis as a warehouse for confiscated Jewish property. After the war, the building passed into the care of the Jewish Museum in Prague and was used as a depository. In 1965, a permanent exhibition of synagogue silver opened there.

Today, the Maisel Synagogue houses the exhibition Jews in the Bohemian Lands, 10th-18th Centuries. The exhibition presents Jewish settlement, communal life, scholarship, legal status, social relations, discrimination, anti-Jewish violence and early modern Jewish culture in Bohemia and Moravia.

The central part of the exhibition focuses on Renaissance Prague Jewry, including Mordecai Maisel, the Jewish Town, the Golem legend and the urban world of Prague’s Jews before the modern redevelopment of Josefov.

The Old New Synagogue, known in Yiddish as the Altneuschul, is the oldest preserved nucleus of Prague’s former Jewish quarter and is described as the oldest active synagogue in Europe. It was built in the last third of the thirteenth century, in early Gothic style, and for more than 700 years served as the main synagogue of Prague’s Jewish community.

One physical feature leaves a lasting impression on almost every visitor: the floor lies below street level. A commonly cited explanation links this to the verse from Psalm 130:1, “Out of the depths I cry to You,” an effect made even more pronounced as street levels rose over the centuries through repeated repaving.

The name itself reflects the urban history of the ghetto. When it was built, it was known as the New Shul or Great Shul, and only later, with the construction of other synagogues in the late sixteenth century, did it become known as the Old New. Local tradition also preserves a popular etymology connecting the name to the phrase al tenai, “on condition,” associated with a legend about stones brought from the Temple in Jerusalem.

This is also where the Maharal enters the story. Maharal is the sobriquet of Rabbi Yehuda Loew ben Bezalel, a major rabbinic figure in sixteenth-century Prague; the term is a Hebrew acronym for Moreinu ha Rav Loew, “our teacher, Rabbi Loew.” Local tradition identifies the place where he sat, near the Torah Ark, as a recognizable spot within the synagogue.

The building is further surrounded by legendary narratives that the site’s own documentation records as tradition, including the association of the attic with the remains of the Golem.

Practical visiting information

As of 1 January 2024, there is no separate ticket for the synagogue; the visit is included in the Jewish Town circuit.
As a rule, the circuit operates daily except on Saturdays and Jewish holidays; on Fridays, closing takes place about one hour before the start of Shabbat.