Josefov is small and it carries an enormous amount, and the only honest way to walk it is slowly. This is the old Jewish town of Prague — the synagogues, the cemetery, the memorial of names — held in a few hundred metres between the Old Town and the river. Go in the morning, and give it the time it asks for.
Start at the Staronová synagoga, the Old-New Synagogue, finished around 1270 and still in use after seven and a half centuries — the oldest working synagogue in Europe, and far plainer than you expect. From there the Old Jewish Cemetery, where the stones are stacked in layers because the community was penned in and could only bury downward. Then the Pinkas Synagogue, whose walls are covered with the handwritten names of some 78,000 Czech and Moravian Jews killed in the Holocaust, and whose upper floor holds children's drawings from Terezín. Stand with it.
The Maisel and the gilded Spanish Synagogue carry the longer history, before and beyond the catastrophe. Walk out down Pařížská — the grand boulevard driven through the cleared ghetto around 1900 — to the Rudolfinum on the embankment. The luxury shops sit on the ghetto's bones; that contradiction is the quarter, and you carry it back to the metro.
