The cemetery in the Jewish quarter of Prague has been a burial ground for members of the Jewish community since ancient times. The oldest known grave is from 1439, but many believe that it has been a burial ground for much longer than that. Over 12,000 gravestones are visible. At least 40,000 people are buried here, and some people estimate that as many as 200,000 may be buried here in total.
The cemetery was in use until 1890. It fell into disrepair by the middle of the twentieth century.
Late in the century, it was placed under the auspices of the Jewish Museum of Prague, which has been restoring it.
Many revered members of Prague’s Jewish community were buried here. Perhaps the most widely known nowadays, due to his appearance in a number of popular, even bestselling, works of fiction, is the legendary Rabbi Judah Loew (c. 1510-1609), a great mystic and scholar of the Kabbalah and also the storied creator of the Golem.
You may be wondering at how close together these headstones appear. There’s no way a body could be buried in between them–not even if they buried them upright (which they did not).
This is not an optical trick of the camera. The headstones are incredibly close together.
This is because the limited physical area of the cemetery was inadequate to store the bodies of the number of people who died over the centuries. And so it was necessary to bring in earth from outside and to layer the bodies with the requisite amount of soil between each one.
As the layers grew, the older headstones were preserved and moved up alongside the newer ones. There are at least ten layers of bodies in the limited space of the cemetery–and maybe twelve or more.
Between the intensity and ages of use, and the disrepair only now being corrected, the place has a surrealistic quality, as if Death itself rests here in the evenings, after the tourists have gone home.
