Maisel Synagogue

Maisel Synagogue

In his day, Mordechai Maisel, the mayor of the Prague Jewish Quarter, was an immensely influential and powerful person. He had such influence that no less than the Emperor Rudolph II himself granted him a number of important privileges that other Jews could only dream of. One such privilege was the chance to build a private prayer hall. We have this to thank for the fact that the wonderful, sumptuous Maisel Synagogue stands in the centre of Prague today.

The construction of Maisel’s private prayer hall was completed in the last decade of the 16^th century. According to period reports by chronicler David Gans it became the most opulent building in the entire Jewish Quarter. Thanks not only to its dimensions but also its three-nave arrangement, atypical for the time, it eclipsed all of the other temples in the ghetto. However, it was damaged by a great fire in 1689 in which it lost most of the valuable items, such as it synagogue utensils and textiles, in the interior. It was rebuilt several times in the following decades, acquiring its present neo-Gothic form between 1894 and 1905. During the Nazi occupation it became a store for property confiscated from Prague’s Jewish community. Around 20 years after the war the interior plaster was restored and a Jewish Museum exhibition was opened. After a complete renovation in the first half of the 1990s it was reopened. The exhibition was overhauled in spring 2015.