Pinkas Synagogue

Holocaust memorial with 80,000 names of Bohemian Jewish victims inscribed on its walls

Address Široká 3, Prague 1 (Josefov)

The Pinkas Synagogue, built in the 15th century, was converted after World War II into the most powerful memorial in the Jewish Museum complex. The names of 77,297 Bohemian and Moravian Jews murdered in the Holocaust are inscribed on the interior walls in dark red and black, arranged by community of origin. The effect is suffocating in the best sense — the sheer quantity of names makes the abstraction of genocide immediately personal.

The upper floor holds children's drawings made in Theresienstadt concentration camp, a few kilometres north of Prague, where Jewish children were imprisoned before transport east. Many of the drawings are by children who did not survive. The memorial is small in floor plan but immense in weight.

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A story
After the Communists came to power, the inscribed names were whitewashed over on the pretext of "restoration damage." The memorial was blank for over twenty years. After 1989, volunteers spent years painstakingly restoring all 77,297 names from the original documentation.