The first Jews settled in Bohemia and Moravia in the 9th century and kept their tradition at many places of the country.
More than one thousand years of their presence left remarkable traces both in culture and architecture. Some of the ghettoes, synagogues, cemeteries, books and art objects have preserved, many sights disappeared without any trace.
Fanatics destroyed many Jewish sights during the crusades already in the 11th and the 12th centuries. They were razed after the pogroms or after expelling the Jews from the country. Since the mid-19th century the segregation of the Jews was abolished, and the original Jewish quarters were demolished or rebuilt and modernized.
A unique Jewish quarter from the medieval period has preserved in Třebíč, where there are two synagogues and a cemetery. In the 20th century the Nazis destroyed most Jewish sights and afterwards the ignorance of the Communists was the last blow.
The first synagogues on our territory were probably simple wooden buildings. One of them is a rebuilt version, preserved in Vlachovo Březí. Since the Middle Ages, buildings of stone replaced wooden ones. The oldest is the Old-New Synagogue in Prague from the mid-13th century. There follow Gothic and Renaissance buildings (the Pinkas s., the High s., the synagogue in Dolní Kounice near Brno and in Holešov). A Baroque synagogue has preserved in Boskovice. In the Czech Republic we can discover the Classicist and Empire sights, the most common are the ones in the style of historicism, such as the Maisel Synagogue in Prague. We can find the representatives of Art Nouveau style or Moorish style, as well as of functionalism. In Milevsko there is a synagogue built in the Cubist style. The most recent synagogue was built in 1937-8 and is situated in Kamenice nad Lipou.
Nowadays there are over 200 preserved synagogues. Two in Prague and one in Brno offer divine services to their respective communities again.
In 1906, the Jewish Museum in Prague first opened; today, it is among the best of its kind in Europe. (www.jewishmuseum.cz)
Terezín, near Litoměřice, is a site of the former concentration camp. The Ghetto Museum and Holocaust Memorial are well worth visiting.
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