Josefov is Prague's old Jewish quarter, squeezed into a few blocks of the Old Town between the river and Old Town Square. It takes its name from Emperor Joseph II, whose 1782 Edict of Tolerance allowed Jews to live outside the ghetto walls for the first time. Most of the original cramped medieval streets were demolished in the 1890s in a controversial modernization that replaced them with Parisian-style boulevards — but six historic synagogues and the layered Old Jewish Cemetery survived.
The cemetery is one of the most affecting sights in Prague: 12,000 headstones packed into a space barely larger than a city block, many graves containing up to twelve layers of burials stacked on top of each other. The Spanish Synagogue, Pinkas Synagogue, and the Old-New Synagogue (still active, the oldest working synagogue in Europe) are all within walking distance. The Pinkas Synagogue memorializes the nearly 80,000 Bohemian and Moravian Jews killed in the Holocaust — their names written in rows on every wall.