Exploring Prague’s Vyšehrad Cemetery It’s not normally on many people’s top ten list of things to do in Prague unless 1) you like cemeteries, 2) you like art/design and 3) you know something of Czech culture. But for some people a trip to the Vyšehrad Cemetery will be an interesting and rewarding experience. I’ll show … Read More
Famous Czechs – Mordecai Maisel Mordecai, Mordechaj or Mordechai, Maisel, Meisel or Meysel. There have been several interpretations of his name so I’m going to stick with Mordecai Maisel (fun fact: in Yiddish, Maisel means mouse). Let’s put ourselves in the last half of the 16th Century. Emperors Maximilian and Rudolf II have been kind … Read More
Prague Jewish Garden Not so fast, this is not some horticultural post about what grows in a Jewish garden. This relates to a cemetery close to Wenceslas Square that pre-dates the current Old Jewish Cemetery by 200 years and is recognised as the oldest Jewish burial ground in the country. In the mid-13th Century a … Read More
Pinkas Synagogue, a National Holocaust Memorial Sometimes you can look at a building and have an idea of what came before a certain time and what came after. This post about the Pinkas Synagogue can also be broken into two parts. Before and after World War Two. The Pinkas Synagogue is on the route of … Read More
Walking on Gravestones The idea for this post started when I gave a Private Walking Tour to a couple of clients in January 2019 and they asked me about the Jewish Cobble Stones i.e. cobble stones made from the headstones of Jewish people, that they had recently read about. I admit that I was not … Read More
The Prague Old Jewish Cemetery This actually was not the first Jewish Cemetery in the city. Following the expulsion of the Jewish community during the crusades, several large families chose to settle in what is now the New Town area of the city but from the early 15th Century were then relocated back into what … Read More