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 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 Jewish objects at the National Museum of Archaeology in Belém are best understood as a dispersed archaeological and documentary constellation. They do not form a single Jewish gallery. Even so, they preserve some of the most relevant material traces for studying Jewish presence, memory, and transmission in Portugal.

The museum, founded in 1893 by José Leite de Vasconcelos, became Portugal’s central institution for archaeological collections. Within that wider national archive, the Jewish-related material occupies a particular place. It connects Roman Lusitania, medieval and early modern Hebrew memory, manuscript culture, and modern collecting practices.

Jewish objects at the National Museum of Archaeology

A preliminary list published by the MNA in 2017 identified several cultural objects with possible or direct relevance to the history of Jews in Portugal. These include Hebrew manuscripts, a Book of Esther scroll, a leather sheet written in Hebrew, and a manuscript concerning the expulsion and general pardon of the Jews. This group shows that Jewish memory in the museum is not only archaeological. It is also textual, legal, liturgical, and archival.

The presence of these documents matters because Jewish history in Portugal was often preserved through fragments. Some fragments are inscriptions. Others are manuscripts, copies, references, or objects displaced from their original contexts. In this sense, the MNA collection helps show how Jewish heritage can survive outside synagogues, cemeteries, and community buildings.

The menorah intaglio from Ammaia

The most important object in this context is the ring stone with a menorah from Roman Ammaia, catalogued as MNA Au 1193. It is a small nicolo intaglio, dated broadly to the Roman period, usually between the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE. Its imagery includes a seven-branched menorah, together with other Jewish ritual symbols associated with Jewish visual culture in Late Antiquity.

This object is exceptional because it belongs to the earliest archaeological evidence for Jewish presence in the territory of present-day Portugal. It does not, by itself, prove a fully organized community in Ammaia. However, it strongly supports the presence of at least one Jewish individual, and it strengthens the broader argument for Jewish life in Roman Lusitania.

The ring stone also changes the scale of interpretation. Jewish history in Portugal is often approached through medieval quarters, expulsions, New Christians, and Inquisition records. The Ammaia intaglio pushes the discussion further back. It places Jewish presence within the Roman landscape of Lusitania, before the better-documented medieval period.

Hebrew memory, replicas, and collecting

Other objects in the MNA list require a more cautious reading. The museum records a pendant amulet in the form of a hexalpha with the Hebrew inscription “Zion,” acquired by José Leite de Vasconcelos in Karlsbad in 1921. This is a Jewish object in the collection, but it is not evidence of ancient or medieval Jewish life in Portugal.

The same caution applies to the replica of a Hebrew inscription from the Jewish cemetery of Espaldão, in Faro. The original was recorded in 1903 on the cemetery wall, and two copies were made. One remained connected to Faro, while the MNA preserved another. Here, the value lies not in original archaeological context, but in preservation, documentation, and the circulation of Jewish epigraphic memory.

Together, these objects make the Jewish objects at the National Museum of Archaeology historically significant. Their importance is not only aesthetic. It lies in the way they connect material culture, Hebrew writing, Roman mobility, collecting history, and the fragile survival of Jewish traces in Portugal.

Jewish Cultural Center Rua da Judiaria & JCC Lisbon was founded in 2019 by Luciano Waldman in Lisbon’s old Judiaria of Alfama. It was created to restore visibility to Rua da Judiaria and to establish an active institution dedicated to Jewish heritage, research, education, and public culture.

Rua da Judiaria was central to the project from the start. The street preserves, in its own name, a direct urban trace of medieval Jewish Lisbon. The center was therefore established in a place where Jewish memory had survived in the toponymy and the urban fabric, but where there was still no living Jewish institution focused on interpretation, education, and continuity.

First Phase of the Center

In its first years, the center focused on the preservation and promotion of Jewish-Portuguese heritage. Its work included historical interpretation, guided visits, cultural programming, exhibitions, lectures, and activities related to Sephardic history and memory. Over time, it became a meeting point for visitors, researchers, artists, diplomats, schools, local residents, and Jewish communities.

This phase defined the institution’s identity. Rather than treating Jewish history as a decorative layer of the city, the center used Rua da Judiaria as a starting point for a broader reading of Jewish Lisbon, from the medieval quarters to forced conversion, the Inquisition, and the modern return of Jewish communal life.

Expansion of the Project

As the project developed, its scope expanded beyond Alfama. Rua da Judiaria became the base for a wider institutional vision linking heritage preservation, Jewish education, contemporary culture, environmental awareness, and civic memory. Within that framework, the center developed initiatives such as intercultural dialogue meetings, exhibitions, Tu BiShvat activities, Reverse Tashlich, and the Daffodil Project.

The creation of JCC Lisbon added a contemporary communal dimension to this work. It reinforced the idea that Jewish heritage in Portugal should not be reduced to ruins or absence. Jewish life is also educational, ethical, communal, and present.

Stolpersteine Portugal

A major step in the institution’s development was the creation and coordination of Stolpersteine Portugal. Through the work of Luciano Waldman and the Centro Cultural Rua da Judiaria, Portugal joined one of Europe’s most important decentralized Holocaust remembrance projects. This required historical research, biographical reconstruction, municipal coordination, and public commemoration, expanding the institution’s mission from local heritage to national memory.

In 2026, that work gained new visibility with the installation of Portugal’s first Stolperschwelle in Lisbon, dedicated to refugees who passed through the city while fleeing Nazism. This confirmed the institution’s ability to connect historical research with public memory in concrete form.

Jew Where

Today, Jewish Cultural Center Rua da Judiaria & JCC Lisbon is entering a new phase through Jew Where, a digital platform dedicated to mapping and interpreting Jewish heritage in Lisbon, Portugal, and beyond. What began in 2019 in one historic street has expanded into a broader project of heritage interpretation, remembrance, cultural programming, community-building, and digital mapping.

The Portuguese diplomat Alberto Carlos de Liz-Teixeira Branquinho (1902-1973) was buried in Lisbon’s Cemitério dos Prazeres.

There is no standalone monument in Lisbon dedicated exclusively to him. For that reason, his grave in Prazeres functions as a discreet point of remembrance, a physical address in the city where a life of diplomatic service intersects with one of the most urgent rescue efforts of the Holocaust’s final year.

Branquinho is most closely associated with Budapest in 1944, when he served as Portugal’s Chargé d’Affaires after Minister Carlos Sampaio Garrido left Hungary. In that role, the Portuguese Legation became a shelter and a paperwork lifeline, issuing protection documents and sustaining a network of safeguarded people under Portuguese responsibility in a rapidly collapsing legal order. A documentary report written by Branquinho records that, by the time he left Budapest on 29 October 1944, roughly one thousand Jews had been saved through Portugal’s protective actions.

Later recognition has helped anchor this history in public memory. Hungarian authorities honored Branquinho and Sampaio Garrido in 2011 with a plaque at the former Grand Hotel Dunapalota-Ritz, where the Portuguese Legation had been located, and his name appears at the Holocaust memorial area behind the Dohány Street Synagogue, alongside other rescuers.

The Jewish Cemetery of Faro is one of the main material testimonies to the reorganization of Jewish life in the city during the 19th century. It is associated with a community described in heritage sources as prosperous at the time, comprising around sixty families, which established its own communal spaces, including the cemetery.

The site’s contemporary recognition is directly linked to the recovery process initiated in the late 20th century. The graves and inscriptions were inventoried and translated by members connected to the Lisbon Jewish Community (CIL) in 1980. In 1984, the Faro Cemetery Restoration Fund, Inc. was created and promoted the restoration of the enclosure. The reconsecration took place on May 16, 1993, in a ceremony attended by the then President of the Republic, Mário Soares, and the site also began to be presented as the “Israelite Museum.”

It is within this context that the mini museum was created. Inside the cemetery there is a small building identified as the former tahará, a space traditionally used for the ritual washing of bodies and for prayers, which today functions as a museological nucleus and interpretive center. Part of this interpretive component includes an area described as a “synagogue,” where a Jewish wedding is recreated, an exhibition resource designed to explain religious practices and communal memory to visitors.

Regarding the content of the mini museum, reference documentation on Jewish heritage in Portugal notes that it was assembled as part of the 1992–1993 restoration. The exhibition includes furniture originating from former synagogues in Faro, reinforcing the connection between communal history and the material culture that has largely disappeared from the urban fabric. In terms of management and continuity, academic and institutional sources record the “Jewish Historical Center of Faro” as a museological facility associated with the Lisbon Jewish Community, open to the public since 1993. The CIL indicates that it currently ensures the maintenance and administration of the site.