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Within Stare Mesto lies Josefov , the Jewish quarter of the city until the end of the nineteenth century, when this ghetto area was demolished in order to create a beautiful bourgeois district on Parisian lines. Kafka spent most of his life in and around Josefov, and the destruction of the Jewish quarter, which continued throughout his childhood, had a profound effect on his psyche. The "sights" of Josefov are covered by one 280kc ticket, or 480kc including the Old-New Synagogue, available from any of the quarter's box offices (daily except Sat and Jewish holidays 9am-4.30/6pm). The best place to begin is the Pinkas Synagogue on Siroka, which contains a chilling memorial to the 77,297 Czechoslovak Jews who were killed during the Holocaust - the names of all the victims cover the walls, while children's drawings from the Theresienstadt (Terezin) camp are displayed in the women's gallery. From here, you enter the Old Jewish Cemetery (Stary Zidovsky hrbitov), established in the fifteenth century and in use until 1787, by which time there were some 100,000 graves here piled on top of one another. Get there before the crowds, and the jumble of 12,000 Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque tombstones are a poignant reminder of the ghetto, its inhabitants subjected to overcrowding even in death. Parizska , Prague's most glamorous shopping street, now runs through the heart of the old ghetto in a riot of turn-of-the-century sculpturing, balconies and turrets. Halfway down here, on the left, is the steep brick gable of the Old-New Synagogue (Staronova synagoga; 200kc), completed in the fourteenth century and still the religious centre of Prague's Jewish community. Originally it was known simply as the New Synagogue, but after several fires gutted the ghetto it became the oldest synagogue building in the quarter - hence its name. Opposite the synagogue is the Jewish Town Hall (Zidovska radnice), founded in the sixteenth century and later turned into a creamy-pink Baroque house crowned by a wooden clocktower. In addition to the four main clocks, there's one on the north gable, which (like the Hebrew script) goes "backwa rds". The nearby Baroque Klaus Synagogue at U Stareho hrbitova 4 and the neo-Gothic Maisel Synagogue at Maiselova 10 display some beautiful religious objects and portray the history of the Jews in the Czech lands until the eighteenth century, while the highly ornate neo-Byzantine Spanish Synagogue , at Vezenska 1, on the other side of Parizska, contains an exhibition on the history of the city's Jewish community since 1791 (after Emperor Joseph I´s Toleration Edict).
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