The Old New Synagogue: Europe's Oldest Active Synagogue

Seven Hundred and Fifty Years of Prayer

In the heart of Prague’s Josefov quarter, tucked between tourist shops and cobblestone lanes, stands a building that has sheltered Jewish prayer for over seven hundred and fifty years. The Altneuschul — the Old New Synagogue — was built around 1270, and it has never stopped functioning as a house of worship. Not during the Black Death, not during pogroms, not during the Nazi occupation, not during Communist rule.

That unbroken continuity makes it unique. Other synagogues are older as structures, but none in Europe has maintained continuous religious use for so long.

Gothic Architecture for Jewish Worship

The Altneuschul is one of the earliest Gothic buildings in Prague. Its double-nave design features distinctive ribbed vaulting — but with a telling modification. Gothic churches typically used cross-ribbed vaults forming an X pattern. The synagogue’s builders added a fifth rib to each vault, creating a pattern that avoids the shape of a cross. This small architectural detail speaks volumes about medieval Jewish identity: adopting the dominant architectural language while deliberately distinguishing sacred Jewish space from Christian forms.

The building is surprisingly small — the main hall measures roughly 14 by 9 meters. The bimah stands in the center, enclosed by a Gothic wrought-iron grille that dates to the fifteenth century. The Aron Kodesh on the eastern wall is one of the oldest in Europe.

The Maharal and the Golem

No discussion of the Altneuschul is complete without the Golem. According to legend, Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel — the Maharal of Prague, who served as chief rabbi in the late sixteenth century — created a creature from clay to protect the Jewish community from antisemitic attacks. This Golem, animated by placing the divine name on its forehead, patrolled the ghetto and defended Jews from harm.

When the Golem’s task was complete, Rabbi Loew deactivated it and — so the legend says — stored its body in the attic of the Altneuschul. The attic has never been opened to the public. This inaccessibility has kept the legend alive for centuries, and the Golem has become one of the most famous figures in Jewish folklore, inspiring novels, films, and even the word “robot” (coined by Czech writer Karel Čapek partly under the Golem legend’s influence).

The Maharal’s seat in the synagogue, marked by a special chair, remains untouched to this day.

Centuries of Survival

The Altneuschul has survived fire, flood, and pogrom. In 1389, the Easter Pogrom killed thousands of Prague’s Jews, and bloodstains on the synagogue walls were, according to tradition, left uncovered as a memorial. The synagogue survived the great fire of 1754 that destroyed much of the Jewish Quarter.

During the Nazi occupation, the synagogue was closed but not destroyed. The Nazis planned to preserve Prague’s Jewish Quarter as a museum of a “vanished race,” which inadvertently saved the buildings. After liberation, services resumed.

Under Communist rule, the Jewish community dwindled but maintained the synagogue. Since 1989, Prague’s Jewish community has revived, and the Altneuschul once again serves as its spiritual center.

Visiting the Altneuschul

Unlike Prague’s other historic synagogues, which are administered by the Jewish Museum as cultural sites, the Altneuschul is managed by the Jewish community and functions primarily as a place of worship. Visitors are welcome, but the atmosphere is devotional rather than museological.

The synagogue is small, and its medieval austerity contrasts sharply with the ornate Spanish Synagogue nearby. But that austerity is precisely its power — standing in the Altneuschul, you are standing where Jews have prayed since the reign of the Přemyslid dynasty, since before the founding of the Ottoman Empire, since before Columbus sailed.

Seven and a half centuries of prayer, offered beneath Gothic vaults that were old when Shakespeare was born.