I spent much of today in the Jewish Quarter in the Old/New Synagogue, which is the one part of the quarter currently open to the public after the recent floods (most other buildings are due to reopen next week). Historically, the streets of the Jewish ghetto were built several feet below those of the surrounding city, a physical representation of the Prague leaders' beliefs that Jews were "lower." At the turn of the last century much of the Jewish quarter was razed and rebuilt with more modern buildings and higher streets--specifically because flooding river waters led to such immense destruction, not to mention poor hygiene. But many of the oldest buildings still sit beneath street level, leaving them vulnerable to the Vltava's whims.

The Old/New Synagogue is such a building--one walks down five or 6 steps from the street to get to its courtyard, and then another five or six steps to enter the building itself. One legend says that the synagogue was purposefully built so that one had to walk down into it, because it is said that when we pray, we call to G-d "from the depths." Other legends talk about how the building has been miraculously saved from the numerous fires that plagued the quarter through the years: once two doves were seen flying off its roof just as a fire that had raged through the town was finally doused--the doves no longer needed to protect the synagogue from the flames. And, of course, the most famous legend of all is that up above the rafters in the attic of the building, sleeps to this day the great golem of Prague, the Frankenstein-like creature created by Rabbi Low in the 16th century to protect the ghetto from Christian mobs. (To describe the golem as Frankenstein-like is actually backwards: the Frankenstein myth itself originally sprang from the golem stories.)

The golem is a myth that didn't circulate in Low's time, it first took hold a century and a half later, but it is true that Rabbi Low, one of the great rabbis of all time, sat for years in this synagogue teaching his interpretations of the Torah and the Talmud. It is true that, having been built in 1270, this is the second-oldest European synagogue in continuous use. And it is true that --while I saw the building stripped to its bare stone walls, the precious antique wooden benches, the Torah scrolls, the velvet chair of Rabbi Low himself all having been carried out to save them from the 5-foot high waters -- the synagogue is unharmed, as solid as it ever was, ready to hear another Shabbat service next Saturday.

The doves have protected it yet again.