The mysterious Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague

The 12,000 headstones in the Old Jewish Cemetery, Starý židovský hřbitov in Czech, are crumbling and covered with ivy, toppled and clustered together.v
Even if it was not Prague’s first Jewish cemetery, but it is the oldest surviving in the city, and its oldest burial date listed is 1439, that of rabbi Avigdor Kara, dates from 1439, and the first documented existence of the holy place goes back to 1438, although the cemetery was probably in use long before that.
The most recent burial was in 1787, and each crooked tombstone in the third oldest Jewish cemetery in Europe tells a story, speaking of the golden days in the 16th century Renaissance when Emperor Rudolph II ruled, about the Jews defending Prague against the Swedes in 1648, during the Thirty Years’ War.
The last person to call this cemetery home was Moses Beck, shortly before Emperor Joseph II forbid people from burying the dead inside the city walls for sanitary reasons.
A new decree prohibited in fact interment in areas where people lived because of health risks, and the notoriously dirty neighborhood of Josefov, where the Jewish cemetery is located, underwent serious cleanup and reconstruction efforts. Part of the cemetery was displaced for a new road, which meant the dead and their headstones were exhumed and stuffed into empty spaces in the already crowded plots.
Although there are more than 12,000 headstones in the cemetery, it is speculated that as many as 100,000 individuals are buried beneath them, stacked 12 deep in some places and, as Jewish customs forbid the removal of old graves, the dead were simply piled on top of one another for centuries.
And, at the time, new dirt was even trucked in to create more earth for burials.

As Prague was a hub of Jewish scholasticism in Eastern Europe, it’s no surprise that some of the foremost figures in Jewish history are buried here, including Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, a central character in the myth of the golem, is buried beneath an ornate sand-colored headstone decorated with a lion. He worked and taught in Prague at the turn of the 17 th century, and a legend says that he created the famous Golem then, a monster made of clay, which stood on the Jews’ in bad times, but later became violent and had to be destroyed. Or the astronomer David Gans has the Star of David and a goose on his, businessman Mordecai Meisel, and rabbi David Oppenheim, with their symbols that appear on the headstones of common graves as well.
Along with the Hebrew script denoting the person buried below, the images engraved on the stones could also communicate names (“Gans” means goose in German), professions (for example books for cantors, scissors for tailors), and characteristic traits (grapes for a full, prosperous life, or the Star of David for devout Jews).

During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, historic synagogues and other sites were destroyed, effectively erasing the physical traces of Jewish culture.
However, the Old Jewish Cemetery and the thousands of artifacts collected by the Jewish Museum escaped this fate through a fortunate providence, as It is believed that the Nazis wished to save these items for a “Museum of an Extinct Race” in Prague, which would inform people of the future about the Jewish race wiped out by the Aryans.
This museum and its subject did not come to fruition, and the cemetery, together with the artifacts of the Jewish Museum, were spared.

Today, visitors can pay their respects to the thousands buried at the Old Jewish Cemetery through tours offered by Prague’s Jewish Museum. Hundreds of pebbles and prayers written on tiny papers can be found resting atop the gravestones.
The attached museum has poems and pictures drawn by children during the Nazi occupation, as well as toys.
Interestingly, nothing may be removed from the cemetery, and even a dog lies buried here, having once been thrown over the wall.
Not by chance, in Hebrew, a cemetery is often called beit chayim (house of life), as death is seen as a beginning, not an end!