Židovská radnice v Praze-Josefově Synagogue

The Jewish Town Hall in Prague's Josefov is not a single building, but a collection of three structures of different ages. It is among the few objects that survived the redevelopment of Josefov. It is also called Maisel's Town Hall. The oldest corner section was financed by Mordechai Maisel, the chief of the Jewish ghetto at that time. He also paid for the neighboring High Synagogue, which remains closely connected to the town hall to this day.

The Jewish Town Hall appears in sources as early as the first half of the sixteenth century, but it is not known where it stood then. At the site of today's building there was apparently a tower-like structure of unknown purpose with a five-part rib vault. It may have been created in connection with the construction of the Old New Synagogue, and part of it has been preserved in the town hall's basement. Maisel's Town Hall was completed together with the High Synagogue in Renaissance style in fifteen seventy-seven.

The appearance of the town hall was then changed by fires in the Jewish Town. After the fire in sixteen eighty-nine, the first major early Baroque reconstruction took place. After another devastating fire in seventeen fifty-four, the town hall received its present Rococo facade and was structurally connected with a neighboring building that the community had purchased earlier. During the Prague redevelopment, neither the town hall nor the High Synagogue were demolished. The community acquired the cleared neighboring plot on the expanded Maisel Street, formerly Rabbi Street, and in nineteen oh-eight, builder Matěj Blecha added a new wing. Its neo-Rococo facade matches the appearance of the older building.

The oldest, three-story corner building stands at the corner of Red Street and Maisel Street. Behind the Rococo facade lies a Renaissance core. The building is crowned with a small tower and a clock. In addition to the usual dials, there is one with Hebrew numerals, and its hands move in the opposite direction. They are said to be an intentional reminder of the Old Town Hall Clock and an expression of the local Jews' Prague patriotism. They are powered by an original manually wound clock mechanism from seventeen sixty-four. The backwards-running clock was also made famous by Apollinaire in his poem Zone.

The town hall is today the seat of the Jewish community, the Federation of Jewish Communities, and the chief rabbi of Prague and Bohemia. A kosher restaurant has been operating on the ground floor of the new wing for nearly a hundred years. In the large assembly hall on the floor above, the rabbinical court bejt din sat until nineteen eighteen. The complex serves as a cultural center of the Prague Jewish community, where celebrations of holidays, weddings, and bar mitzvahs are held. Together with the High Synagogue, it is protected as a cultural monument.