ࡱ> lnk5@0ubjbj22"~XXo7% 8 2! " 9 ; ; ; ; ; ; $!R:$_  _    9 9  ӻ  !02!,%;,%,%\  _ _ d. MX. Where Did All the Pretty Old Things Come From? Judaica Provenance Research at the Jewish Museum in Prague Magda Veselsk, Head of the Documentation Department, Jewish Museum in Prague The Jewish Museum inPrague (hereafter the Museum) was founded more than a hundred years ago. Its collections were for the most part, however, put together during the Second World War (hereafter the war). The circumstances under which the collections were established are now well known to the public: based on an initiative from the Prague Jewish Religious Community, items owned by Jewish religious communities in what was then the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (hereafter the communities) were shipped to Prague in 19421944 and were thereby protected from destruction. Immediately after the war, the Museum and its collections were put under the control of the state and, in 1950, were official nationalized. After 1989, the Federation of Jewish Communities inthe Czech Republic, which had become the legal successor to the Jewish communities, associations and corporations, restituted the Museums collections from the state. In 1994, the Federation placed the collections in the Jewish Museum in Prague, the legal successor to the Jewish Museum that was founded in 1906. Despite the fact that the owner of the collections is known, the Museum considers Judaica provenance research in its collections to be one of its priorities. The aim of this research is to gain detailed information about the life of the Jewish minority inthe Czech Republic. From the perspective of provenance research, the Museums collections can be divided into three parts: a) The collections of pre-war Jewish museums (inMlad Boleslav, Prague and Mikulov), b) Items from the property of communities in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia with specific areas extending into the Sudeten borderregions, and c) Items from the property of individual people that were transferred to the Museums collections from the warehouses of the Treuhandstelle (a trustee office that administered confiscated Jewish assets). As this group of items comprises mainly art objects and books, however, we will not be discussing it in detail here matters concerning artworks come under the Looted Art section and matters relating to books are described by my colleague Michal Buek in his presentation. We use several sources for our provenance research to identify the origin of items that were included in the Museums collections during the war. The primary source is the actual wartime register whose entries are in German. In this catalogue, each item has its own card, which also contains information about the collection place, i.e. the locality from where the item was sent to the Museums collections. The category of the collection place, however, contains within it a number of pitfalls (for more on this, see my article in the book Textiles from Bohemian and Moravian Synagogues see below), for it does not always refer to the place where the item was actually in use; on the contrary, in some cases, it refers only to the place from where the item was sent to the Museum. Items belonging to the Jewish community inKosova Hora are an example of this; these items were sent to the Museum from Sedl any, which is also mentioned as the collection place in the wartime catalogue. This difference is even more striking on a regional level: for example, items from communities located in the Brno Oberlandrat, a large administrative unit, were initially assembled inBrno and then sent en masse to Prague. Items from individual communities were mixed together in the process of packing (which is why, in the wartime catalogue, the collection place is mentioned as, for example, Brno  Jev ko, Vyakov). Considerable complications are also associated with, for example, wartime Prague warehouses where shipped items were deposited prior to being registered at the Museum. For reasons that are clear (e.g., inundation of shipments, insufficient handling room, lack of staff, time constraints, mental stress, fear of deportation), information concerning the origin of many shipments (i.e., specific crates, baskets or boxes) has not been preserved, which is why, in such cases, the Prague warehouse is given as the collection place in the wartime catalogue. This situation is not too satisfactory, which is why we seek to be as precise as possible with regards information on the origin of items. We go about this in several ways: 1) Archive research: here we focus mainly on extant wartime information relating to the individual shipments, which often mentions: a) where the items were actually used (e.g., items from the synagogue in `tnovice that were shipped via the Blovice collection place), or b) how the items came into the possession of the communities before the war (e.g., the community in ernovice purchased the items from Prague synagogues that were closed down in 1906) or c) how the items came to be used by the communities before the war (the community in Svitavy in the Sudetenland sent its silver liturgical items to Prostjov as a deposit in 1939). Where necessary, we also explore the fate of specific communities (particularly to see if they were disbanded or merged with another community before the war; e.g., Kolodje nad Lu~nic/Tn nad Vltavou). 2) Literature research: we also identify items by referring to published information. Among such sources is Aladar Deutsch s book (see below), which describes items from individual synagogues in Prague that were closed down in 1906. This information was used when identifying items from Prague synagogues that were kept in one of the Prague warehouses, namely the Pinkas Synagogue, during the war. We also frequently use topographic and other literature, particularly books on Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia edited by Hugo Gold (see below), as well as lists of historical and cultural monuments inindividual regions. Also of great use are the photographs of items that are included in these books. 3) Research into the actual items: dedicatory or other inscriptions can also provide a clue for determining the origin of an item. It is necessary here, however, to take into consideration the fact that, in addition to information about the synagogue or place that the item was donated to, inscriptions contain information mainly about the donors, i.e., where they themselves came from; their place of origin, however, is not necessarily the place where they subsequently lived and/or where they went to the synagogue. Identifying the collections of pre-war Jewish museums in Bohemia and Moravia constitutes a separate area of provenance research. The Jewish Museum inPrague was founded in 1906 by a museum society that was put together for precisely this purpose. In 1942, its collection became a source of inspiration and point of departure for our Museums collections, as well as an integral part thereof. As a collection place in the wartime catalogue, it is referred to as Prague Museum or the Old Museum. For various reasons, however, it is difficult to identify the original form of the Prague collection. We tried to do this in 2006 by putting together an exhibition on this topic and publishing a catalogue to go with it, entitled Defying the Beast (see below). This catalogue presents the complete pre-war collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague, as we had managed to reconstruct it. The fate of the Jewish Museum inMikulov (founded in 1936) was considerably complicated at the beginning of the war. In 1938 the collection was transferred from the border town of Mikulov to Brno, from where in 1942 it was shipped to Prague. In the wartime catalogue, it is referred to most frequently as the Moravian Museum collection place. We are currently trying to identify this collection, but this is a very difficult task as its pre-war inventory has not been preserved; on the other hand, we have access to archive sources concerning acquisitions to the museums collections before the war. The Jewish Museum inMlad Boleslav (1900) was founded by the local community and compriseditems that were no longer in use the discovery of this fact makes it much easier to identify the content of the collection, for which a pre-war list has also been preserved. The collection of the Jewish Museum inMlad Boleslav, however, has yet to be researched in detail. Tracing the fate of individual items from the Museums collections after the war is an important part of its provenance research. Some items (mainly artworks and books) that were acquired for the Museums collections from private owners via the Treuhandstelle were returned to them in 19451950. The Museum also provided items to the nearly fifty communities that were revived after the war; ten of these communities are still in existence. After the demise of the remaining communities, however, only a few of the items on loan were returned to the Museum. The rest met with a varied fate: some of them remained inCzechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic), some were sent abroad illegally (i.e. without state permission). These items now appear at art auctions (e.g., a synagogue curtain at Sothebys a few years ago) or in antique shops, as well as in public collections (e.g., two Torah mantles in the collections of the Jewish Museum inNew York) and in private collections (e.g., a synagogue curtain that belongs to the Museums collections offered for sale by a private person in 2009). The Jewish Museum inPrague, however, has never stopped considering these items as part of its holdings, which is why it promotes all activities that focus on finding and returning them. The Czechoslovak Communist State was also not a particularly good overseer of the Museums collections. There were two kinds of losses during the period when the Museum was in state hands (19501994): a) On the one hand, the losses were linked to efforts aimed at enriching the state budget by gaining valuable resources in foreign currency (the Museum was pressured to sell items from its collections abroad) and b) at the same time, the state did not pay too much attention to the safety of the items that were placed in repositories. Among the notable items that went missing in this period are a number of artworks that still appear in auction halls and in antique shops from time to time (most recently, a work by Ilona Singerov was on offer at the Czech branch of Dorotheum, 2009). Current legislation, however, does not enable these works to be acquired back free of charge if they appear on sale or are offered for purchase directly to the Museum. The largest group of items that the Museum lost during the Communist regime, however, comprises the afore-mentioned items that were sold from the collections primarily Torah scrolls (approx. 1,500), which were purchased in 1964 by the Westminster Synagogue in London with the help of a philanthropic member of the synagogue. Other items were sold or donated from the Museums collections inthe 1960s, primarily to Czechoslovak commercial partners abroad, including Jewish businessmen who sought to acquire items from the Museum for their congregations. The origin of these sales and donations is covered in my article that was published in the 2006 issue of the Judaica Bohemiae journal (see below). Although the collection of the Jewish Museum inPrague is one of the largest in the world (it contains as many as 40,000 items, in addition to books and archival documents) and is indeed the largest collection that comes from a precisely demarcated geographical area, there are still more items of Judaica in the territory of the Czech Republic. We are also focusing our attention on these additional items as part of our research into the collections of other museums in Bohemia and Moravia for the purpose of finding comparative material for the items in our collection. Our research is focused on documenting these items, both in writing and photographically. I described its first and, it must be said, very good results inthe 2009 issue of the Judaica Bohemiae journal (see below). As part of this research, we managed to discover in addition to individual items several groups of Judaica which, thanks to the enlightened views of the curators at the time, were part of the collections of local museums before the WWII already. One of the largest groups of Judaica has been preserved inthe Municipal Museum ofPoln; a group of Judaica in the collections of the Pilsen museum may also be ranked at its level. Also of importance is the collection of synagogue textiles in the /03n  [ \ w y     ) 1 2 3 B H I R S ^ _ a b ˵˵˪˔˔˔˔˵˔˔˔˵˔˪h=`h}mH sH h=`hHLmH sH h=`h6VmH sH h=`h)5mH sH h=`h_hmH sH h=`h\#mH sH h=`h&\mH sH h=`h=`5\mH sH h=`h&\5\mH sH h=`h}5\mH sH 6no &']^BCx"& ( (L/M/L4M4558:gd#?gdvgdogdv-uu   3 4 > ? 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