Pinkas Synagogue, Prague

Pinkas Synagogue began as a family synagogue, commissioned by Aharon Meshulam Horowitz in 1535. It now serves as a memorial to more than 80,000 Czech Jews murdered during the Holocaust. The building joins late Gothic ribbed vaulting to Renaissance decoration, while its entrance portal is wholly Renaissance.

Within, painted inscriptions preserve 77,297 names of Jewish victims from Bohemia and Moravia; each is grouped by the community from which that person came, with biographical dates alongside. The memorial opened in 1960 after artists Václav Boštík and Jiří John spent years creating it. Upstairs, children’s drawings from the Theresienstadt ghetto survive because their teacher, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, concealed them before her deportation to Auschwitz. This synagogue holds both the texture of a sixteenth-century prayer house and an immense record of lives cut short.