The Old Jewish Cemetery – Prague

Old Jewish Cemetery
The Old Jewish Cemetery was established in Josefov, Prague’s former Jewish ghetto in the fifteenth century.  The oldest tombstone dates back to 1439 and marks the grave of the poet Avigdor Kara.  I was left in awe at the number of tombstones on such a small area of land.  There are about 12,000 tombstones and an estimated 100,000 burials.  Since space was at a premium, bodies were buried on top of each other.  It is estimated the graves are layered about 12 deep.
Old Jewish Cemetary
Many prominent people are buried in this cemetery, including:  Rabbi Loew who is associated with the legend of the golem, the mayor of the Jewish Town Mordechai Maisel, the Renaissance scholar, historian, mathematician and astronomer David Gans, scholar and historian Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, and rabbi and collector of Hebrew manuscripts and printed books David Oppenheim.
Old Jewish Cemetary

Getting there: From underground Staroměstská ( green A line) follow the signs to Starý židovský hřbitov. Old Jewish CemetarySources: Old Jewish Cemetery [Jewish Museum in Prague] and Old Jewish Cemetery [Prague.net].

Advertisement

2 Responses to “The Old Jewish Cemetery – Prague”


  1. 1 Mark Forman November 4, 2009 at 12:47 am

    Nice posting. The golem starter-heavy stuff :D


  1. 1 Favorite Posts of 2009 « The Daily Bubble Tea Trackback on December 29, 2009 at 11:15 pm

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s




Categories

Feel Lucky?

Lotus

Brown Hawk-Owl

Cyrestis thyodamas formosana

Want To Be Listed?

Low Tide in Kending

Archives


Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 49 other followers