Josefov - The Rough Guide to Prague - page 146

less stowaways attempting to steer a course through the storms of embattled nationalities”,
as one Prague Jew put it.
THE FINAL DECADES
Despite several anti-Semitic riots in the years before and after the war, the foundation of
the new republic in 1918, and, in particular, its founder and first president, T.G. Masaryk,
whose liberal credentials were impeccable, were welcomed by most Jews. For the first
time in their history, Jews were given equal rights as a recognized ethnic group, though
only a minority opted to be registered as Jewish. The interwar period was probably the
nearest Prague's Jewish community came to a second “golden age”, a time most clearly
expressed in the now famous flowering of its Deutsche Prager Literatur , led by German-
Jewish writers such as Franz Werfel, Franz Kafka, Max Brod and Rainer Maria Rilke.
After the Nazis occupied Prague on March 15, 1939, the city's Jews were subject to an
increasingly harsh set of regulations, by which they were barred from most professions,
placed under curfew, and compelled to wear a yellow Star of David. In November 1941,
the first transport of Prague Jews set off for the new ghetto in Terezín , 60km northwest
of the city. Of the estimated 55,000 Jews in Prague at the time of the Nazi invasion, more
than 36,000 died in the camps. Many survivors emigrated to Israel and the US. Of the
eight thousand who registered as Jewish in the Prague census of 1947, a significant num-
ber joined the Communist Party, only to find themselves victims of Stalinist anti-Semitic
purges during the 1950s.
It's difficult to calculate exactly how many Jews now live in Prague - around a thousand
were officially registered as such prior to 1989 - though their numbers have undoubtedly
been bolstered by those Czech Jews who have rediscovered their roots and, more signific-
antly, by the new influx of Jewish Americans and Israelis. The controversy over Jewish
property - most of which was seized by the Nazis, and therefore not covered by the ori-
ginal restitution law - has been resolved, allowing the community to reclaim, among other
things, the six synagogues, the town hall and the Old Jewish Cemetery.
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Klausová synagoga
UStaréhohřbitova•Sun-Fri:Nov-March9am-4.30pm;April-Oct9am-6pm• JewishMuseumtickets 300Kč/
480Kč • Metro Staroměstská
Close to the entrance to the Starý židovský hřbitov (Old Jewish Cemetery) is the Klausová
synagoga , a late seventeenth-century building, founded in the 1690s by Mordecai Maisel on
the site of three small prayer rooms in what was then a notorious red-light district. The re-
latively ornate Baroque interior contains a rich display of religious objects such as prayer