Pinkas Synagogue

The Pinkas Synagogue (Pinkasova synagoga) is the second oldest surviving synagogue in Prague, built in 1535 in the Late Gothic style by Aharon Meshulam Horowitz for his family as a private house of prayer. Today it functions primarily as the most powerful Holocaust memorial in the Czech Republic: the names of 80,000 Bohemian and Moravian Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide are hand-lettered directly onto the synagogue's interior walls, arranged by their home communities and accompanied by dates of birth and death. The inscription project was carried out between 1992 and 1996 by painters Václav Boštík and Jiří John; it was originally completed in the 1950s but was erased by the communist authorities after 1968 and had to be painstakingly restored. On the upper floor, a permanent exhibition displays around 4,500 drawings made by children held in the Terezín (Theresienstadt) ghetto — the work of lessons led by the Bauhaus-trained artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, who was later murdered in Auschwitz along with most of her young students.