Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Josefov

Anyone who knows me, knows that I can't go anywhere without visiting a cemetery. The older, the better. The more haunted, the better. So, I took a trip with Big, Gay Black Man (oh that journey is another entry in itself) over to the Jewish Quarter of Prague the next day. It was the most interesting part of Prague I was able to see.

My main reason was of course, the cemetery.
This cemetery is several hundred years old. It's probably double the age of the U.S., and then some. And the bodies...are buried some say 12 deep. I've never seen anything like it. It is said that Kafka liked to hang here. I could see why. It's pretty, in an odd way. There are nooks and crannies, and odd things that you don't find in other cemeteries, like rocks on grave stones, and one stone that had nothing but bits of paper and wrappers folded neatly by various passing people and fitted neatly in the hebrew letters. Odd.

Some photos:










The oldest grave in the cemetery is that of a rabbi, poet and physician named Avigdor Kara, who died in 1439. His original tombstone was recently replaced by a replica. Kara was one of the few survivors of a pogrom at Easter time in 1389 when approximately 3,000 Jews, almost the entire Jewish population in Prague, were killed by the Christians living in the city, after local Catholic priests accused the Jews of desecrating the Host used in the sacrament of Holy Communion.
The cemetery itself was closed in 1787.