Why you should experience the Pinkas Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of Prague.
The Pinkas Synagogue is Prague’s most silent voice, a house of prayer transformed into a house of memory.
Step through its modest doorway and you feel it instantly: the air thickens, the temperature drops, and a solemn quiet takes hold. The walls rise around you not in color or ornament, but in language, 77,297 names hand-painted in red and black Hebrew script, each one a life lost in the Holocaust. They cover every surface, floor to ceiling, turning architecture into elegy. The space hums with reverence; even breath feels like interruption. It’s not a grand monument, but something purer, an act of remembrance so intimate that it feels like standing inside prayer itself.
What you didn’t know about the Pinkas Synagogue.
Built around 1535 by the Horowitz family, the Pinkas Synagogue is the second oldest in Prague and one of the few that has survived almost entirely intact.
Originally a private place of worship, it later became a communal synagogue for the ghetto’s prominent families. Its Gothic ribbed vaults and Renaissance portals mark the transition between two eras, the same tension that has always defined Jewish Prague: preservation and change. After World War II, the building was entrusted to the Jewish Museum, which in 1955 transformed it into a memorial to the Czech and Moravian Jews murdered by the Nazis. The names inscribed on its walls, arranged by town and family, were compiled from community records by artists Jiří John and Václav Boštík, whose minimalist approach gave the memorial its devastating simplicity. In 1968, the communist regime closed the synagogue, and for over two decades, the inscriptions were hidden behind plaster; when restoration began after 1989, conservators uncovered each name, painstakingly renewing the memorial one brushstroke at a time. Below the main hall lies a small exhibition of children’s drawings from the Terezín ghetto, fragile sketches of flowers, butterflies, and imagined freedom, made by hands that never left the camps. Few visitors realize that the synagogue still sits slightly below ground level due to centuries of flooding from the Vltava, making it feel even more like a descent into memory.
How to fold the Pinkas Synagogue into your trip.
Begin your visit in the morning, before tour groups arrive, when the building’s quiet can settle fully.
Step inside and let your eyes adjust to the dimness; the names take shape slowly, line by line. Move clockwise around the hall, tracing the rhythm of the inscriptions, each city, each family, each vanished world. Descend to the lower level to see the children’s drawings; they will undo you in the gentlest way. Afterward, walk out through the small courtyard into the Old Jewish Cemetery next door, its layered gravestones echo the walls inside, another language of endurance. If you visit in winter, the chill deepens the stillness; in summer, the filtered light softens the pain into quiet gratitude. Do not rush, do not speak. The Pinkas Synagogue asks nothing of you but presence. When you step back into the sunlight, the world will feel louder, but also more sacred.
Hear it from the Foresyte community.
“Streets feel heavy with history but also kind of peaceful in their own way. Not really about big views or flashy buildings, more about slowing down and actually thinking about what went down here.”
Where meaningful travel begins.
Start your journey with Foresyte, where the planning is part of the magic.
Discover the experiences that matter most.
