Josefov: the Jewish Quarter, told straight
The oldest active synagogue in Europe, the layered cemetery, and a memorial wall of names. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Staroměstská metro
Come up and walk north into *Josefov*. Go in the morning, unhurried — this is a walk that asks you to read and to stop, not to tick boxes.

2. Old-New Synagogue (Staronová synagoga)
Completed around 1270 and still holding services — the oldest active synagogue in Europe. Modest, dim, Gothic. Cover your head, go in if it's open, and notice how small and how old it is at once.

3. Old Jewish Cemetery
Twelve thousand stones, layers of burials going down where the community was forbidden to expand outward. Walk the marked path slowly. It's the most affecting thing in the quarter and it asks for quiet.

4. Pinkas Synagogue
The walls carry the handwritten names of roughly 78,000 Czech and Moravian Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Upstairs, children's drawings from Terezín. Go in. Read some of the names. This is the heart of the walk.

5. Maisel Synagogue
Renaissance-era, now part of the Jewish Museum, telling the history of Bohemian Jews up to the eighteenth century. A quieter, more explanatory stop between the two harder ones — take the breath it offers.

6. Spanish Synagogue
The most ornate of them all — Moorish Revival, gilded, completely unlike the others. Built in 1868 on the site of the quarter's oldest synagogue. Worth going in for the interior alone.

7. Pařížská & the Rudolfinum
Walk out down *Pařížská*, the grand tree-lined boulevard cut through the old quarter around 1900, to the river and the neo-Renaissance Rudolfinum concert hall. The contrast — luxury shops on the bones of the ghetto — is part of the story. Metro is back the way you came.

Josefov: the Jewish Quarter, told straight