So I haven’t mentioned it on the blog yet, but I was in Prague two weeks ago. Everyone but everyone seems to love Prague, and I’ve been wanting to visit for as long as I’ve been in Germany. Markus and Karen, having grown up in East Germany only a few hours drive from Prague, have both been there several times, and were very eager to go along as my guides. We’ve been trying to plan this trip since about October, and we finally got it in just now. We flew out of Cologne on Saturday morning (after I’d just gotten back from my trip to the US the day before, but we won’t dwell on that) and came back Tuesday afternoon. We did and saw lots of things. Prague is, indeed, a very beautiful city. The different kinds of architecture were really interesting to see, all jammed into the relatively small city center.
One of the things we did while we were there was to visit Josefov, the Jewish quarter. For almost 1000 years, it was the only place in the city where Jews were allowed to lived, and typified the original meaning of ghetto. At the beginning of the 20th century, most of the area, which was extremely overcrowded and lacking in basic sanitation, was torn down and replaces with wider streets and “modern” buildings. Seven synagogues and the old Jewish cemetery were spared. Today, as there aren’t a whole lot of Jews left in town to use the buildings for their original purposes, the sites have been turned into a museum with exhibits on the history of the neighborhood as well as Jewish life and religious practices. The cemetery was particularly interesting. It’s a relatively small space, which was filled with something like 100,000 graves over 400 years. Because Jewish custom prohibits moving bodies once they’ve been buried, and there was no other place to put the bodies, they covered the graves over with dirt and started on a new layer. You can see a few pictures that I took below.
The Jewish influence is not entirely gone in Prague, however. The city is absolutely awash with concerts; every church and every hall plays (mostly) classical music every night to crowds of tourists. And while we were there, one of the advertising posters that we saw was for a concert in one of the old synagogues. It was going to be something like “The Best of Broadway Showtunes and Jewish Folk Music.” I couldn’t tell if the first part of the program was intentionally heavy on Jewish songwriters or all the really great Broadway composers are just mostly Jewish. On the program: Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and, of course, the music from Cats. Followed by Hava Nagila. Is it just me, or is that a little strange?
