Jewish Museum in Prague

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The administrative wing of the Jewish Museum attached to the Spanish Synagogue
The Maisel Synagogue

The Jewish Museum in Prague (Czech Židovské muzeum v Praze ) in the Josefov district contains extensive collections of synagogue objects from the Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia . It was visited by around 660,000 people in 2017.

From 1943 to 1945 the collections were the Jewish Central Museum of the SS .

history

The museum 1906–1939

A first museum was founded in 1906 by the historian Hugo Lieben and Augustin Stein , the representative of the Czech Jewish community and later head of the Prague Jewish community . The initial aim was to preserve valuable cult objects from those Prague synagogues that were demolished in the course of the reconstruction of the Jewish community at the beginning of the 20th century.

Closure and reopening by the SS

With the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia , the museum was closed on March 15, 1939. In the course of the synagogues being closed at this time, the Jews living there sought to bring their synagogue objects to Prague to protect them from looting, in order to catalog and store them.

A circular of the Jewish Town Hall in Prague from 1942 calling on the Jewish Communities to send their movable to the Prague Museum, meant that in addition to Torah scrolls and large quantities chandeliers , Toramäntel , Toravorhänge and the contents of entire archives to Prague were sent. In this way, around 100,000 synagogue objects were collected, which were cataloged by up to 40 employees.

The Eichmann department under Adolf Eichmann set up the museum in 1942 as a central Jewish museum to collect the sacred objects confiscated from the liquidated Jewish communities and synagogues in Bohemia and Moravia. It was founded at the suggestion of Augustin Stein. After tough negotiations, the Nazis approved the project to set up the museum, albeit for completely different motives than the museum's founders. Shortly after the Wannsee Conference on the Final Solution to the Jewish Question , the synagogues in Prague were restored and incorporated into the Central Museum .

SS-Untersturmführer Karl Rahm approved on November 30, 1942 the exposé of the first exhibition "Jewish life from the cradle to the grave". It is not documented whether Rahms superior Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich, who works in Prague, were aware of the project. According to a study, the “Economy Group” in the office of the Reich Protector was informed. The exhibition was completed within four months and approved by SS-Sturmbannführer Hans Günther , on whose instructions the "bloody ritual" of kosher shedding was added. He arranged for the exhibition to be accessible only to himself and his entourage. It remained closed to other visitors.

The Jewish Central Museum was opened by the SS on April 6, 1943.

A total of four exhibitions were organized by 1944. The fifth, which was supposed to have the theme “History of the Jews in Bohemia and Moravia”, could no longer be organized because too many of the Jewish employees, including the then head Dr. Polak, were imprisoned or already deported.

Motifs

With the construction of the museum, the Jewish actors connected the hope of being able to protect their valuable religious objects from vandalism and looting. It was thought possible at first to get it back later, a perspective that seemed increasingly unrealistic as the persecution progressed.

Little is known about the National Socialists' motives , as they destroyed most of the documents before they left Prague. Only a confirmation of monument protection for the graves in the Old Jewish Cemetery from January 1945 is certain . The name " Museum of a Lost Race " does not appear in any known primary source.

The exhibition was not limited to reproducing the prevailing anti-Semitic propaganda. Rather, it offered a comparatively realistic and scientifically objective insight into the religious life of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia. Studies suggest that the museum was set up for internal training of SD cadres .

New beginning after the Second World War

The Jewish community, which had shrunk to fewer than 1,000 members, found a fully preserved museum after the end of the Second World War . This consisted of a synagogue, eight meetinghouses and 50 warehouses.

In 1950 the museum was offered to the city. Private continuation was no longer possible due to the aging of the faithful and the small number of members of the Jewish community. In 1950, Hana Volavkova became the first director of the “State Jewish Museum”. Government support was inadequate and museum work was ideologically restricted. Nevertheless, the trade journal Judaica Bohemiae, which is still published today, was launched in 1965 . In 1960 the memorial for the Bohemian and Moravian victims of the Shoah was opened in the Pinkas Synagogue , but it was only open to the public for a few years.

In 1994 the museum was returned to the Jewish community in Prague. Leo Pavlát has been the director since then .

present

Memorial to the victims of the Shoah in the Pinkas Synagogue
Přístavní můstek, painting by Georges Kars

Today, in addition to the classic form of exhibition, the museum uses electronic media to present current Jewish life in the Czech Republic . Additional music events attract around 500,000 visitors to the rooms every year.

The Jewish Museum Prague has been working on the publication of an encyclopedia of the Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia (Encyklopedie židovských obcí, sídlišť a památných míst na území ČR) for several years. The basis for this encyclopedia are the collections of the former employee of the museum Jiří Fiedler . So far there have been articles on more than a thousand keywords. With the murder of Jiří Fiedler in January 2014, work on the encyclopedia came to a standstill. The Jewish Museum is now trying to continue the work.

The museum consists of the following objects:

literature

  • Jan Björn Potthast: The Jewish Central Museum of the SS in Prague. Opponent research and genocide under National Socialism , Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main a. a. 2002. ISBN 3-593-37060-3
  • Dirk Rupnow: perpetrator, memory, victim. The "Jewish Central Museum" in Prague 1942-1945 , Picus-Verlag, Vienna 2000. ISBN 3-85452-444-7
  • Magda Veselská: Archa paměti: Cesta pražského židovského muzea pohnutým 20. stoletím [The memorial ark: The journey of the Prague Jewish Museum through the turbulent 20th century], Academia: Prague, 2013, ISBN 978-80-200-2200-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Annual report 2017
  2. ^ Jan Björn Potthast: The Jewish Central Museum of the SS in Prague
  3. ↑ Elisabeth von Kiderlen: Museum of a submerged race Der Spiegel 46/1988, accessed on November 6, 2012
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Ernst: In the name of history: collecting - saving - he / counting; infrastructural configurations of German memory . Fink, Munich 2006, p. 436 ( Digitale-sammlungen.de ).
  5. ↑ Gottfried Fliedl: The negative utopia of the museum. Museum and exhibition policy in the Nazi era 1933 - 1945 . In: Gabriele Anderl, Alexandra Caruso (Hrsg.): Nazi art theft in Austria and the consequences . 2005 ( google.de ).
  6. ↑ Magda Veselská: 'The Museum of an Extinct Race' - Fact vs. Legend . In: Zidovské muzeum v Praze (ed.): Judaica Bohemiae . tape LI , no. 2 , 2016, p. 41-85 ( ceeol.com ).
  7. ↑ http://www.jewishmuseum.cz/sbirky-a-vyzkum/veda-a-vyzkum/dokumentace-zidovskych-obci/

Coordinates: 50 ° 5 '22.4 "  N , 14 ° 25' 5.4"  E