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.