Object of the month


2013

MEMORIAL DOCUMENT OF THE JERUSALEM SYNAGOGUE

Memorial document of the Jerusalem Synagogue, Czech part, whole

During a survey of the Jerusalem (Jubilee) Synagogue on 7 January 2003, representatives of the Prague Jewish Community and the Jewish Museum discovered a...

More information


2013

Ezekiel Landau, Noda bi-Yehuda (Famous in Judea)

This month marks the 300th anniversary of one of the greatest rabbinic authorities of the eighteenth century, Rabbi Ezekiel Landau (1713–1793). He was born on the 18th of Heshvan 5474 (7 November 1713) in Opatov, Galicia. In 1744, after...

More information


2013

The Diary of Ruth Brösslerová

Thirteen-year-old Ruth Brösslerová came to the ghetto Terezín with her parents and younger brother on 28 January 1942, arriving on Transport U from Brno. In her diary she not only provides careful and remarkably observant chronological...

More information


September 2013

Carved and engraved shofar

The shofar is a ritual musical instrument, developed from the ancient pastoral horn. It is made from the horns of certain kinds of permitted animals. In the Diaspora, it is used for festive blowing during the High Holidays

...

More information


2013

A gift made after the return from exile

The Jeiteles family's curtain is not an expensive cult object but it was donated at a time when gifts to synagogues in Prague were quite rare. When, after more than three years in exile, the Jews of Prague were allowed to return to their...

More information


2013

Portrait of the Writer and Critic Max Brod

This year marks the 130th anniversary of the birth of the most famous Prague native ever, the Jewish German writer Franz Kafka (1883–1924). As is well known, Kafka’s work survived only thanks to the care given it by one of his closest...

More information


2013

Manuscript with a penitential prayer for the Jews of Kroměříž massacred by the Swedish army in June 1643

In addition to various prayers intended for the cantor in the synagogue and a prayer for the welfare of the sovereign, the Emperor Charles VI, or the Archbishop of Olomouc, this manuscript also contains memorial prayers, a prayer for the...

More information


2013

David Gans – Tzemah David

The historian, mathematician and astronomer David ben Solomon Gans was born in 1541 in Lippstadt, Westphalia. He received a religious education at yeshivot in Bonn, Frankfurt and Krakow, where he studied science and history. In 1564 he...

More information


2013

Interior of the Vinohrady Synagogue, Prague

Jindřich Eckert (1833-1905) is considered to be the most important Czech photographer of the nineteenth century. In 1897-1902 he focused mainly on photographing monuments in the rapidly disappearing Prague ghetto. Plans for a large...

More information


2013

The oldest synagogue textile in the collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague

The so-called Perlsticker curtain is not only the oldest synagogue textile in the collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague but is also, perhaps, Europe’s oldest preserved synagogue textile bearing a date. The curtain (or at least part...

More information