Pinkas Synagogue
Gothic-era synagogue whose walls bear the hand-painted names of nearly eighty thousand Holocaust victims.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Pinkas Synagogue in Prague, its walls painted with the names of nearly eighty thousand Czech and Moravian Jews murdered in the Holocaust, opens in 1968, when officials abruptly padlocked the memorial and blamed the damp. It goes back to painters Václav Boštík and Jiří John, who spent much of the 1950s copying those names by hand, community by community, from transport papers and ghetto registers. The names run husbands beside wives and children beneath parents, grouped by the town each family once called home.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Jerusalem Synagogue | Prague
Moorish Revival synagogue of striped stone arches, built to replace three demolished houses of worship.
Židovské muzeum v Praze - Maiselova synagoga
Renaissance-turned-Neo-Gothic synagogue built by a court financier, now displaying centuries of Jewish history.
National Gallery Prague – Trade Fair Palace
Functionalist 1920s exhibition hall turned modern and contemporary art museum, rebuilt after a devastating fire.
Klausen Synagogue
Early Baroque synagogue rebuilt after a devastating seventeenth-century ghetto fire, with a soaring carved Torah ark.
Spanish Synagogue
Moorish Revival hall of gilded stucco arabesques and star-patterned ceilings, styled after the Alhambra.
The Ceremonial Hall
Neo-Romanesque mortuary hall built for a centuries-old Jewish burial brotherhood, beside a historic cemetery.