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Pinkas Synagogue
Pinkas Synagogue
Pinkas Synagogue
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The Pinkas Synagogue (Czech: Pinkasova synagoga) is a former Jewish congregation and synagogue, located at Široká 3, in the Jewish Town of Prague, in the Czech Republic. Completed in 1535, the synagogue the second oldest surviving synagogue in Prague and was completed in the Gothic style. Its origins date from the 15th century and are connected with the Horowitz family, a renowned Jewish family in Prague. Today, the synagogue is administered by the Jewish Museum in Prague and commemorates approximately 80,000 Czech Jewish victims of The Holocaust.

Key Information

History

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Interior: main body of the synagogue

15th to 18th century

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An archaeological excavation showed that in 15th century in the area of present Pinkas Synagogue there were wells, a mikveh and inhabited houses. By 1492 in one of those houses there was a private oratory belonging to a distinguished Prague Jewish family of Horowitz. In 1535 one of the family members, Aharon Meshulam Horowitz, decided to replace the house by a synagogue for his family. There are competing accounts about whether the synagogue was named after a previous owner,[1] a brother,[2] or a grandson.[3]

The building mixes Gothic and Renaissance styles – for example, the reticulated vault is made in the late Gothic style but its ornaments have Renaissance features and the portal is pure Renaissance. Between 1607 and 1625 an annex in Renaissance style was added and so the synagogue was extended with a vestibule, a women's section and a balcony. The architectural plan of the annex was designed by Juda Coref de Herz (also the architect of the Maisel Synagogue).

The floor of the synagogue is below the ground level so it was repeatedly afflicted by floods and moisture. In the second half of 18th century it was necessary to restore aron-ha-kodesh and bimah damaged by flood and so they were changed to the Baroque style. About the same time (in 1793) successful businessman and communal leader Joachim von Popper[4]: 405–406  donated the synagogue with a wrought-iron Rococo grille which adorns the bimah. The grille is decorated with the Magen David, with a Middle-Age Jewish hat.[4]: 86 


19th century to modern times

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In 1860, a radical step was taken to solve the problem of floods – the floor level of the synagogue was raised by 1,5 m. The Baroque bimah disappeared, the arrangement of the seats was modernized (seats surrounding the walls as in Old-New Synagogue were replaced by the church-like rows) and pseudo-Romanesque style dominated the space. However, less than century later, during reconstruction in 1950–1954, the original floor-level as well as the appearance of the synagogue were restored.

During World War II, the Pinkas Synagogue served as a storehouse of Jewish liturgical utensils, which, after the ban on Jewish services in the autumn of 1941, could no longer be commonly used in Prague synagogues.[5]: 60  When the Jewish Central Museum was established in the second half of 1942, the synagogue was also to serve as a repository of monuments, which it collected from Czech and Moravian communities, but also as a conservation office.[5]: 70  Although the Jewish Central Museum considered at the beginning of 1943 moving the pre-war exposition of the Prague Jewish Museum to the Pinkas Synagogue, less than a year later it abandoned this idea due to various difficulties and the Pinkas Synagogue remained a warehouse.[5]: 85–90 

In following five years, the walls of the synagogue were covered with names of 77,297 [6] Bohemian and Moravian Jewish victims of the Shoah. The names are arranged by communities where the victims came from and complemented with their birth and death date.[5]: 178–179  The memorial was designed by painters Václav Boštík and Jiří John. In 1960 it was opened to public, but it was closed after less than a decade, in 1968, after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. It was said that the reason for closing was moisture. After the fall of communist regime in 1989 the synagogue was reconstructed for three years and then opened to public, but it took another three years to restore the inscriptions of the names on the walls that were damaged by moisture. Moreover, in 2002, as a result of more flooding, the inscriptions were again restored.[7]

Permanent exhibition

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Names of the Holocaust victims from Czech lands on the synagogue's inner wall

On the first floor of the synagogue there is an exhibition of pictures drawn by children in the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Children drew them during lessons led by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis (1898–1944), a painter, who studied at Bauhaus, Weimar. Dicker-Brandeis's experience from Bauhaus influenced the conception of her drawing lessons in Theresienstadt. She encouraged children to express themselves in drawing, to grapple with their grim experiences from the ghetto, as well as to capture their memories from home and dreams about the future. Their pictures therefore offer wide-ranged testimony about the daily reality of the ghetto and about individual children. Most of the children, as well as Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, were murdered in Auschwitz. The only witnesses of their lives, their drawings, "survived" because Dicker-Brandeis hid them in Theresienstadt before her deportation to Auschwitz. After the war about 4,500 pictures were handed over to the Jewish Museum in Prague.[8]

Beside activities of the museum, Pinkas Synagogue serves also the religious community.

The Faces of the Victims of the Shoah

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Projection of photographs of Shoah victims in the form of video mapping onto the mikveh of the synagogue is freely visible every evening except Fridays and Jewish holidays from Široká Street. The start and end of the projection is variable with regard to the time of sunset throughout the year. It lasts 2.5 hours in the winter months, but is shortened to 45 minutes in the summer (due to later sunset times).[9]

Digital extension of the Pinkas Synagogue

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The digital extension of the exhibition is available through an information kiosk inside the synagogue and a web interface. The electronic database contains the names of individual victims, including their portraits, if the images are available to the museum. The database also makes it possible to search for the location of the names of individual victims on the walls of the synagogue.[10]

See also

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References

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Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Pinkas Synagogue

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from Grokipedia

The Pinkas Synagogue is the second oldest preserved synagogue in , located in the Jewish quarter and constructed in late Gothic style in 1535 as a private house of prayer for the prominent family, founded by Aaron Meshulam Horowitz. It features architecturally valuable Jagiellonian Gothic vaults and served as an active place of worship until the Nazi occupation in 1941. Following , the was converted into a memorial dedicated to the victims of from and , with the names of 77,297 Jewish individuals murdered by the Nazis inscribed on its interior walls in a project completed between 1950 and 1954. Today, it is administered by the Jewish Museum in and stands as a poignant testament to the scale of destruction inflicted on Czech Jewry during the Shoah, adjacent to the Old Jewish Cemetery.

History

Medieval Origins and Construction (15th-16th Centuries)

The Pinkas Synagogue traces its origins to a modest private prayer hall established on the site before 1492, situated in Prague's quarter amid a Jewish community that had flourished since the 13th century under varying degrees of imperial tolerance and restriction. This early structure served the needs of local Jewish families, reflecting the quarter's role as a dense settlement hub with ritual facilities like a nearby dating to the late . The family, a prominent lineage in Prague's Jewish elite, became closely associated with the site, leveraging their influence in community administration to expand religious infrastructure during a period of relative stability before intensified regulations. Reconstruction began after 1519 under Aaron Meshulam , who had risen to the position of sexton in the Jewish community, overseeing its ritual and organizational functions. Completed in 1535, the rebuilt synagogue functioned explicitly as a private house of prayer for the Horowitz family, positioned between their residence at the House of the Coats of Arms and the adjacent Old Jewish Cemetery. Attributed jointly to Aaron and his wife Neham—daughter of —the project incorporated a detailing their patronage. This timeline aligns with the late medieval to early modern transition, when private family synagogues supplemented public ones like the Old-New , requiring implicit or familial approvals under Holy Roman imperial oversight rather than broad public licensing. Architecturally, the 1535 completion adopted a late Gothic style, evident in its reticulated vaults, narrow single-aisle layout, and ornate stonework on elements like the Holy Ark and bimah, positioning it as the second oldest extant in after the 13th-century Old-New Synagogue. The design eschewed full innovations at this stage, prioritizing functional durability for intimate worship amid the community's growth to several thousand members by the mid-16th century. Such private constructions underscored the Horowitzes' socioeconomic standing, enabling discreet religious practice amid episodic expulsions and taxes, prior to Habsburg consolidation of control in 1526 which formalized stricter building consents.

Usage and Alterations in the Early Modern Period (17th-18th Centuries)

The Pinkas Synagogue functioned primarily as a private house of prayer for the Horowitz family during the 17th and 18th centuries, while also accommodating broader elements of the Jewish community amid the constraints of life imposed since the mid-16th century. This usage encompassed daily and services, reflecting the family's enduring and the synagogue's role in sustaining religious observance for affluent Jewish households in the overcrowded district. Community records indicate no shift to exclusive public access, but the structure's proximity to the Old Jewish Cemetery and supported ritual practices tied to lifecycle events and within familial and communal contexts. To address spatial demands from ghetto population pressures, significant alterations occurred in the early . Between 1607 and 1625, architect Judah Tsoref (d. 1625) constructed a late-Renaissance annex, incorporating a women's gallery (machitze) above the main and along the south side to segregate worship spaces in line with Ashkenazi customs. These expansions included a vestibule, , and facade modifications with paired late-Renaissance windows and a portal, enhancing and decoration without altering the core Gothic interior. No comparable structural changes are documented for the , suggesting stabilization amid Habsburg-era regulations on Jewish building. The synagogue endured major adversities, including the catastrophic ghetto fire of June 23, 1689, which destroyed much of the surrounding Jewish Quarter, and the anti-Jewish riots of 1744– incited by economic grievances and rumors. These events caused widespread and against , yet the Pinkas sustained minimal documented harm, as evidenced by the absence of contemporary rebuilding records and its continued operational use. This resilience underscores the structure's robust Gothic vaults and the community's efforts to preserve key religious sites despite recurrent persecutions.

Developments in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

In 1860, following severe flood damage, the interior of the Pinkas Synagogue underwent significant modernization to address recurrent water ingress issues. The floor level was raised by approximately 1.4 meters through backfilling, which covered the original bimah and required the removal of decorations from the Holy Ark, walling up of a portal, and replacement of seating with Neo-Romanesque benches. These alterations reflected broader 19th-century engineering responses to Prague's Vltava River flooding under Austro-Hungarian administration, prioritizing functionality over strict preservation of medieval features. Amid reforms in the —granting civil rights in 1848 and full equality by 1867—the synagogue's role evolved within Prague's increasingly assimilated Jewish community. Originally a private prayer house for the family, it saw reduced active worship as many integrated into secular society, favoring newer, Reform-oriented synagogues outside the former . By the early 20th century, urban redevelopment of the district (1907–1910) demolished surrounding structures, leaving the Pinkas Synagogue sunken below the new Široká Street level and exacerbating maintenance challenges. In the following Czechoslovak in 1918, the building entered partial disrepair amid dwindling congregational use, though it retained symbolic value as a remnant of Bohemian Jewish heritage. A 1925 inspection by the Construction Commission proposed excavating the backfill and conducting an archaeological survey to restore original elements, but these recommendations went unimplemented, allowing deterioration to persist. Preservation efforts aligned with emerging national recognition of Prague's historic Jewish sites, underscoring their cultural contributions despite declining ritual functions.

Nazi Era, Postwar Memorialization, and Communist Period

![Names of Holocaust victims inscribed on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue][float-right] In 1942, the Nazis incorporated the Pinkas Synagogue into the in , confiscating it alongside other Jewish sites to store ritual objects gathered from synagogues and communities across and . This repurposing stemmed from Nazi policy to assemble a comprehensive exhibit of Jewish artifacts as a "Museum of an Extinct Race," anticipating the total elimination of from the region following mass deportations that began in on October 15, 1941. The synagogue thereby escaped physical destruction, unlike numerous others razed during the war, as its utility for artifact storage aligned with the regime's archival ambitions under the administration. After the war's end in 1945, surviving Czech pursued converting the structure into a , drawing on wartime records to document losses. From 1954 to 1959, under communist-era state supervision, artists Václav Boštík and Jiří John hand-inscribed approximately 77,297 names of Bohemian and Moravian Jewish victims—along with their birth years, death years, and residences—onto the interior walls, transforming the space into Europe's earliest large-scale name . The opened to visitors circa 1960 but soon encountered structural decay from rising , which damaged inscriptions by 1965 and necessitated public closure in 1966; communist and centralized control over heritage sites exacerbated neglect. Further restrictions followed the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, suspending access until the regime's collapse. Limited reopening occurred in the early post-Velvet Revolution, prior to comprehensive repairs.

Architecture and Physical Features

Exterior and Structural Design

The Pinkas Synagogue's exterior embodies late , completed in 1535 amid the dense urban confines of Prague's Jewish Quarter, resulting in a narrow, single-aisle rectangular form tightly integrated with surrounding buildings. This constrained layout directly influenced the modest scale and elongated facade, prioritizing structural efficiency over grandeur in a ghetto setting marked by spatial limitations and historical building linkages. Structurally, the synagogue relies on stone construction, incorporating elements evident in earlier foundational pillars and decorative features, with walls buttressed by supporting pillars for stability. Key Gothic traits include pointed arches framing the entrance portal and five windows, while the interior-supporting reticulated ribbed vaults extend the design's load-bearing logic to the exterior profile. Later adaptations, such as early portal enhancements and late-Renaissance paired windows on street-facing facades, overlay the original framework without fundamentally altering its Gothic skeletal integrity.

Interior Layout and Historical Decorations

The Pinkas Synagogue features a high single- hall typical of late Gothic Jewish , with seating arranged along the perimeter walls facing inward toward the central bimah, facilitating communal visibility during services. The bimah, a raised stone podium for , occupies the center of the space and was adorned with rich decorative elements, though partially obscured following 19th-century flood damage. A separate women's gallery was constructed on the south side between 1607 and 1625 by architect Judah Tsoref (also known as Juda de Herz), providing segregated viewing above the main while maintaining acoustic proximity to the proceedings below. The vaulted ceiling consists of a late-Gothic reticulated structure with painted motifs, including decorative elements that imitate stuccowork through geometric and floral patterns adhering to traditional Jewish , which avoids figurative representations. These paintings, dating to the 16th and early 17th centuries, originally highlighted the ribs and capitals in vibrant hues to enhance the interior's solemnity. Additional stone carvings embellished the Holy Ark and entrance portal in early style, while a commemorative Hebrew inscription from 1535 records the founding by Aaron Meshulam Horowitz. High windows along the eastern wall, overlooking the adjacent cemetery, provided natural illumination focused toward the bimah, supporting the liturgical emphasis on recitation.

Transformation into Holocaust Memorial

Inscription of Victim Names

The inscription of victim names in the Pinkas Synagogue constituted a state-directed memorial project under the Czechoslovak Communist regime, which nationalized the Jewish Museum in Prague in 1950 and placed the synagogue under its administration. This initiative focused on documenting verified Jewish victims from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia through methodical compilation of records, prioritizing empirical verification over broader commemorative symbolism. The resulting memorial lists 77,297 individuals, representing those confirmed perished in the Holocaust based on post-war investigations. Artists Václav Boštík (1913–2005) and Jiří John (1923–1972) executed the inscriptions between 1954 and 1959, hand-lettering names on the interior walls of the and galleries. Names are organized by the locality of each victim's last residence prior to , with entries arranged alphabetically by surname within families; residents occupy the main , while those from other areas fill the side walls and galleries. Birth and death dates, or dates of last known survival such as , accompany entries where available, often derived from transport manifests to Theresienstadt or Auschwitz. The project's empirical foundation relied on card indexes assembled from transport papers, camp registration lists, and survivor accounts, cross-referencing pre-deportation populations against deportation and mortality data to confirm victim status. This approach yielded a precise tally reflective of the ~90% mortality rate among the approximately 118,000 Jews deported from the Protectorate, underscoring the scale of loss without encompassing non-Czech victims or unverified cases. The inscriptions, completed ahead of public opening in 1960, emphasized factual enumeration drawn from archival evidence rather than interpretive narrative.

Associated Exhibitions and Artifacts

An adjacent room on the first floor of the Pinkas Synagogue houses a permanent exhibition of children's drawings from the Terezín (Theresienstadt) Ghetto, dating from 1942 to 1944. These works, totaling 4,387 in the Jewish Museum in Prague's collection, were created by Jewish children interned in the ghetto during World War II. The drawings depict scenes of daily life, fantasies, and ghetto conditions, serving as direct primary evidence of the inmates' psychological and physical experiences under Nazi confinement. The artworks were produced in secret art classes led by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, a Bauhaus-trained and educator deported to in 1943, who encouraged drawing as a therapeutic outlet amid and overcrowding. Before her transfer to Auschwitz-Birkenau in October 1944, where she perished, Dicker-Brandeis hid approximately 4,000 drawings in suitcases to preserve them from destruction. Their authenticity is corroborated by survivor testimonies, ghetto records, and the unbroken maintained by the Jewish Museum since postwar recovery. Curated by the Jewish Museum in , the display integrates select drawings with contextual panels on child deportations, emphasizing the ghetto's role as a transit point to extermination camps; over 15,000 children passed through , with fewer than 1,500 surviving. This exhibition underscores the evidentiary weight of juvenile perspectives in documentation, distinct from adult accounts, by revealing unfiltered insights into trauma, resilience, and fleeting normalcy without reliance on later interpretations.

Restoration, Preservation, and Modern Adaptations

Environmental Damage and Repair Efforts

The Pinkas Synagogue was closed to the public in 1966 after began rising through the walls as early as 1965, leading to progressive deterioration of the plaster surfaces bearing the inscriptions. This infiltration caused flaking and effacement of the names, compromising the structural integrity of the walls during the communist era. Initial repair efforts in the late , including foundation insulation in the and , were undertaken but interrupted following the 1968 Soviet invasion, allowing dampness to persist and exacerbate damage. Following the 1989 , comprehensive physical restoration recommenced, with inscriptions systematically cleaned and repainted by 1995, enabling partial reopening. Czech heritage authorities consolidated damaged wall sections and implemented measures to mitigate ongoing humidity, though full resolution of groundwater issues proved challenging due to the site's low-lying position adjacent to the River. Catastrophic flooding in August 2002 inflicted further harm, with surging to heights of up to 1.5 in the and vestibule, cracking plaster and necessitating renewed interventions. Repairs, completed by late , involved meticulous cleaning and restoration of affected inscriptions, supported in part by a $28,000 grant from the to address flood-induced degradation. These efforts highlighted persistent trade-offs between preserving original materials for authenticity and applying modern stabilizing techniques to prevent recurrent failure, as iterative fixes underscored the limitations of earlier communist-period management.

Digital and Technological Extensions

In 2017, the Jewish Museum in Prague introduced an within the Pinkas Synagogue, enabling visitors to access a digital database of over 78,000 names of Holocaust victims from and inscribed on the walls. This system allows users to search by name, residence, or other biographical details and generates a navigation map pinpointing the exact wall location of specific inscriptions, thereby aiding in the identification of potentially faded or obscured entries without physical strain on the structure. The database draws from historical records, including pre-war demographic data such as the 1930 census of Czech Jews, to link wall inscriptions with details on victims' fates, including deportations to ghettos like Theresienstadt and extermination sites. This digital linkage preserves against ongoing of the physical inscriptions, which have flaked due to prior moisture damage, and supports genealogical verification by cross-referencing archival sources. A complementary online interface extends these capabilities remotely via the museum's website, where users worldwide can perform identical searches and view virtual representations of the memorial layout, mitigating access barriers posed by the site's limited capacity and humidity-controlled visiting restrictions. External to the synagogue, the museum initiated digital projections of victims' photographs onto the gable wall of the adjacent mikveh building on October 16, 2017, displaying looping sequences of individual faces—initially 52 in five-minute cycles—from submitted family archives to evoke personal remembrance beyond the aggregate wall names. By 2017, the museum had amassed thousands of such images, enhancing the memorial's emotional and evidentiary scope through periodic evening displays.

References

  1. https://www.jewishmuseum.cz/en/explore/sites/pinkas-synagogue/
  2. https://pinkas.jewishmuseum.cz/historie
  3. https://www.wmf.org/projects/pinkas-synagogue
  4. https://www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/source_view.php?SourceId=29732
  5. https://prague.eu/en/objevujte/jewish-museum-in-prague-pinkas-synagogue-pinkasova-synagoga/
  6. https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/8904-josephstadt
  7. https://www.jewishmuseum.cz/en/e-shop-en/judaica-bohemiae/
  8. https://www.private-prague-guide.com/article/prague-pinkas-synagogue-jewish-town/
  9. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41444625
  10. https://gocity.com/en/prague/things-to-do/complete-guide-to-the-jewish-museum
  11. https://rachelsruminations.com/synagogues-in-prague/
  12. https://richedwardsimagery.wordpress.com/2018/07/03/the-jewish-museum-in-prague-pinkas-synagogue-and-the-old-jewish-cemetery-prague-czech-republic/
  13. https://www.jewishmuseum.cz/en/explore/permanent-exhibitions/monument-of-shoah-victims/
  14. https://pinkas.jewishmuseum.cz/pamatnik
  15. https://www.nytimes.com/1993/01/31/travel/prague-s-jewish-heritage.html
  16. https://cja.huji.ac.il/hmm/browser.php?mode=set&id=46512
  17. https://www.jewishmuseum.cz/en/explore/permanent-exhibitions/children-s-drawings-from-the-terezin-ghetto-1942-1944/
  18. https://www.jewishmuseum.cz/en/collection-research/collections-funds/visual-arts/children-s-drawings-from-the-terezin-ghetto/
  19. https://www.timesofisrael.com/dreams-of-theresienstadt-children-on-display-in-drawings-exhibit/
  20. https://forward.com/community/398055/these-children-didnt-survive-the-holocaust-but-their-art-still-gives-me/
  21. https://c.jewishmuseum.cz/files/obsah/newsletter/Newsletter2002_03.pdf
  22. https://www.jta.org/2003/09/30/lifestyle/prague-shul-reopens-after-floods
  23. https://www.jta.org/archive/around-the-jewish-world-after-complex-renovation-work-famous-prague-shul-is-reopened
  24. https://pinkas.jewishmuseum.cz/navigacni-mapka
  25. https://blog.ehri-project.eu/2024/04/30/digital-holocaust-media-at-the-jewish-museum-in-prague/
  26. https://pinkas.jewishmuseum.cz/vyhledavani
  27. https://pinkas.jewishmuseum.cz/
  28. https://c.jewishmuseum.cz/files/documents/annual-reports/2017JMPannualreport_web.pdf
  29. https://apnews.com/general-news-travel-and-tourism-363a4f37740441ef8a8dffe096380ce5
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