The golem in you: New Jewish LARPing experience brings participants to Prague

As a nine-year-old, I stewed restlessly for long hours in the back of our car with my brothers as my family went on an epic camping trip across Europe. One of our stops was in Prague, and I still remember being shown a staircase with a closed attic door at the top, and being told it was where the Maharal of Prague created his golem – or perhaps even that the golem itself was still sitting up there. Either way, it was a dramatic moment for a child. The golem is a particularly Jewish monster, a kind of terracotta cousin of Frankenstein's. In one version of the legend, the Maharal fashioned a human figure from earth and brought it to life by inscribing the Hebrew word emet, truth, on its forehead. To deactivate it, one would remove the letter aleph, leaving met, dead.