Praga Museum of Warsaw

This guide to the Praga Museum of Warsaw begins in 1996, when workers scraping plaster off a tenement ceiling uncovered painted zodiac signs and figures praying at a stone wall, evidence of a Jewish house of prayer hidden inside an ordinary apartment building. It traces the building back to around 1818, when Berek Lejzerowicz Rothblith raised it beside the old Rozycki bazaar, in a Praga where Poles, Jews, and Russian traders shared the same narrow streets. Stand where the old prayer hall once stood and look up at the ceiling above you.