Jewish Cemetery Prague
by Joan Carroll
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Dimensions
18.000 x 12.000 inches
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Title
Jewish Cemetery Prague
Artist
Joan Carroll
Medium
Photograph - Digital Photograph
Description
Walking through the streets of the Jewish Quarter in Prague, you have to look up to see the tombstones...with good reason. The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague is more than a cemetery; it�s an archive. The cemetery is a 500-year-old testament to steadfast belief in the face of persecution and neglect. To visit the cemetery is to walk through the remains of what was once one of the world�s major centers of Jewish life. The Old Jewish Cemetery is located in what used to be the Jewish ghetto in Prague, an area named Josefov, and the cemetery reflects the old neighborhood. Josefov was a part of town with narrow streets and where space was at a premium, an area of immense overcrowding. Its population density was many times higher than the non-Jewish parts of the city, making it a slum in the center of Prague. Over the course of more than 900 years, generations of Jewish men, women and children were packed into the ghetto. The Old Jewish Cemetery is similarly crowded. The cemetery itself was in use from the early 15th century (the oldest preserved tombstone dates back to 1439) until 1787. The numbers of grave stones and numbers of people buried there are uncertain, because there are layers of tombs. However, it has been estimated that there are approximately 12,000 tombstones presently visible, and there may be as many as 100,000 burials in all. According to Jewish religious laws, Jews must not destroy Jewish graves and in particular it is not allowed to remove the tombstone. This meant that when the cemetery ran out of space and purchasing extra land was impossible, more layers of soil were placed on the existing graves, the old tombstones taken out and placed upon the new layer of soil. This explains why the tombstones in the cemetery are placed so closely to each other. This resulted in the cemetery having 12 layers of graves and why the cemetery lies above street level in many places.
FEATURED PHOTO, Gothic Romance group, 1/15/14
FEATURED PHOTO, Urban Images group, 1/12/14
Uploaded
January 10th, 2014
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