Tomb of Mordechai Meisel

1601

Tomb with high tombstones on either end, with Hebrew inscriptions on outside of all sides.
Mordechai Meisel (1528–1601) was a court Jew, merchant, philanthropist and builder in Prague. Meisel became a member of the Prague Jewish Communal Council in 1576 and later served as its head. This is his tomb, in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague. He used the wealth he amassed from loaning money to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II and from his trading of luxury goods, gold, art, silver, wool, and fats, to benefit Prague’s Jewish community. He supported charities and communal organizations, played a leading role in building the High Synagogue, and built a hospital for the poor and the sick.

Credits

Buchhändler / Wikimedia, Grab_Mordechai_Maisel.JPG. Licensed under (CC0 1.0).

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 5.

Engage with this Source

You may also like

Drawing of two skeletal faces.
Tooltip info icon

Mortality

Though Jacob Steinhardt came to be best known for his woodcuts depicting biblical and Jewish subjects, this print, made during World War I, evokes the horrors he witnessed on the battlefield. Much of…
View Source
Exterior photograph of wooden building with shingles.
Tooltip info icon

Zabłudów Synagogue, Poland

There were once hundreds of wooden synagogues in Poland and Lithuania, but only a very few examples of this particularly Jewish form of architecture have survived. The Zabłudów synagogue, built around…
View Source