The latter is among the largest Gothic buildings in Prague and is, today, the oldest preserved synagogue in Europe. It was erected about 1270 and has later additions. It contains a double-alsled hall, with ribvaulting supported on two pillars, into which a portal leads, with delicate ornamental decoration, the oldest surviving portal in Prague. A Gothic iron screen divides the synagogue in two. The Old-New Synagogue was formerly the centre of the Jewish town, which grew up out of a settlement of Jewish traders not far from the banks of the Vltava, in the earliest period of urban settlement. Although the Jewish population suffered numerous pogroms, it numbered at the beginning of the 18th century about a quarter of the total inhabitants of Prague. The community lived, however, within the confines of the small area enclosed by the Ghetto in this part of the town which, picturesque, but unhygienic, disappeared in the slum-clearance plans of a large-scale scheme of urban renovation at the end of the 19th century. And yet Prague possesses the greatest concentration of historical Jewish remains in Europe. The Nazis, who in great part carried out their plan of liquidating the Jews in Europe and destroying everything Jewish, thought to found in Prague a kind of school of anti-Semitism and so left here intact not only the whole former Ghetto area, but gathered together, in several synagogues, remains from other Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia. Opposite the Old-New Synagogue, in Cervena ulice, is the High or Town Hall Synagogue (Vysoka synagoga) dating from the 16th century, where the collections of the Jewish State Museum are deposited. Adjoining it is the former Jewish Town Hall, with its characteristic little wooden tower and a clock with Hebrew numbers on the dial. Both buildings, along with others, were erected at the cost of Mordechai Maisel, the richest man in Rudolphinian Prague. The inventory of his property, made at his death, came to what was at that time the fantastic sum of over half a million gulden. Named after Maisel is a street and the Maisel Synagogue in this part of the town, today used as a part of the Jewish Museum, with a remarkable collection of silver articles from the Czech synagogues. Here are exhibited upwards of 500 liturgical vessels, spice jars, chased dishes and drinking vessels, with figure decoration, a small part of the wealth confiscated by the Nazis and deposited in Prague, following the liquidation of 153 Jewish religious communities during World War II. (In the adjacent house is a period-style restaurant, U Golema (At the Golem), which aims to combine the material needs of people in the living present with the Jewish romanticism of the past (you will learn more about the traditional Golem legend below, in connexion with the Old Jewish Cemetery). The greater part of the collections of the Jewish Museum, its topographical department and objects documenting Jewish religious customs, are concentrated in the street, U stareho hfbitova (By the Old Cemetery), in the house formerly belonging to the Burial Club, and in the former Klaus Synagogue (Klausova synag6ga), built in 1680. Thus in the synagogues in which there is no one left to pray are endless rows of little silver hands, with which the place in the torah was pointed out, hundreds of men, susah, which were nailed to the door of dwelling houses, wishing peace to the departing one, whole batteries of eight-branch candlesticks, lit on the Feast of Chanuk, hundreds of thousands of prayer books, as well as rare first editions printed in the first Prague Jewish printing works of Horowitz. There is no museum in the world that has more than a dozen or so of torah curtains. In the Prague museum-synagogues there are 2,800, besides whole kilometres of brocades, embroideries and plain linen. From the street, U stareho hibitova, is the entrance to one of the historically most interesting Jewish cemeteries (2idovski hibitov) in the world, and, after the Nazi destruct, ion of the cemetery in Worms, the oldest Jewish burial ground in Europe. Its core was burial land bought at the beginning of the 15th century. It was extended several times by additional purchases of land, but the area was still too small, so that in certain places burials are superimposed in as many as ten or more layers. Burials ceased here at the end of the 18th century. If we leave out of account the Gothic tombstones from the 14th century, transferred from the old cemetery which was given up about 1350, the oldest tombstone is that marking the grave of the poet, Abigdor Karo, buried here in 1439. Over 12,000 tombstones are scattered among gnarled old trees, a sea of stone slabs, standing at all angles and sunk, some more, some less, by the subsidence of the soil, while others still form orderly rows — slabs roughly chiselled or inscribed, of crumbling sandstone, dark with tge, or of rose-coloured marble, with epitaphs In elegant cript, the stone archives of long-past generations, still docunenting the difference between rich and poor. But all are sin kng irrevocably, at the rate of ten centimetres in a century, to oin the dust of those whose graves they marked. And although the Talmud forbids the making of images, on many ombstones is carved the likeness of a young girl or of a child, ymbols of the trades and, on the gravestone of Rabbi Spira imself, his portrait! The scholars and experts are at a loss or an explanation. Was Prague Jewry overtaken by a wave f heresy? It is a fact that Jewish sectarians fled to Prague ringing with them views unauthorized by the Talmud; are were gathered the cabalists, here lived Loebel Pressnitz, ho painted the sign of God on his breast and smeared it ith phosphorescent matter, causing a panic of terror when I bared his breast in the dark twilight of the temple. Or as it the work of artisans, accustomed to carve rudely In one the emblems of a rose, a tulip or a heart, who tried eir skill on the monuments for the Jewish cemetery? Or i the Prague Jews just follow the fashions in the Christian meteries in their surroundings? In 1564, beside the wall of the Old Cemetery, the Jewish rnmunity erected a high school of Talmudistic studies, ospital and a synagogue, all under one roof. In 1573 a certain luda Low, son of Bezalal, son of Khaim, achieved such eputation for learning and wisdom that with his person associated the legend of the Golem robot, which he is said have created out of clay.
Post je objavljen 13.07.2012. u 00:13 sati.