Praha 19, or Behind the Wall

Services last night were at the Alt-neu Shul, or the Old-New Synagogue, one of the oldest standing synagogues in the world. If you want to learn more about its architecture (early Gothic), or the history of Josevof, the Jewish Quarter, you can google or wikipedia it very easily, so I won't waste much time with it here. I want to talk about praying in this place.

To start with, the services that are held in the Altneu are Orthodox services, which means men and women sit separately from each other. In most places, this consists of some kind of barrier down a center aisle that separates men from women, or the women sit in a gallery above the men. However, everyone can usually see and hear everything that is going on in the service.

Here, the women sit beind a stone wall that goes all the way to the ceiling and is at least four feet thick. It blocks most of the sound from the inner congregation, where the men are. If you want to see or hear anything, you can crowd around one of the tiny windows in the wall. Most of the windows are maybe twice the size of your computer screen, but somewhat narrow. I was lucky to get a seat by the window, but it was also halfway under the coat rack, so all one could see were my feet sticking out from under fifty coats.

It was awful. The women in the back, most of them didn't even try to follow the service. There was an adorable baby scooting around the floor that most people were cooing over, and what looked like a weekly gossip circle. The women's section got all of the street noise, and - imagine it - church bells interrupted the Amidah, the silent prayer!

As I watched through my window, I caught sight of Michael, the only boy in the Jewish Studies program. We weren't more than six feet away from each other, but it was like being in two different worlds - his, a spiritual one, full of chanting voices, and mine, a completely un-Shabbat one, full of gossiping voices. Michael turned and caught my eye at one point, and I all but jumped - he saw me! There was some connection between us after all!

I tried to close my eyes and at least do my own silent prayer, but the effort wasn't worth it. I tried to tell myself that Shekhina (G-d) would hear me, even buried under a pile of coats, but the thought only frustrated me more. It made me more than a little angry. Actually, I was furious. As the yeshivaniks (religious schoolboys) filed out of the sanctuary, laughing and joking with one another, I wanted to slap them.

Even if it means being able to pray in one of Judaism's most historical synagogues, it is absolutely not worth it if one must pray behind a wall.