Židovské muzeum v Praze
http://lod.ehri-project-test.eu/institutions/cz-002279 an entity of type: CorporateBody
Židovské muzeum v Praze
Established in 1906, the Jewish Museum in Prague is one of the oldest Jewish museums in Europe. Its founders were the historian Salomon Hugo Lieben and the representative of the Czech-Jewish movement and city councillor August Stein. At the core of its collection were items from synagogues that had been demolished as a result of the clearance of the Prague Jewish ghetto at the beginning of the 20th century.
The Jewish Museum Association was abolished in the autumn of 1939 following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Its collection was taken over by the Prague Jewish community which, on the basis of an initiative from Karel Stein (head of the department for rural affairs), prompted the founding of the Central Jewish Museum in 1942. The Nazis approved of the project after lengthy negotiations, although they had completely different aims than the founders. Under the cover name 'museum', the Central Jewish Museum became a safe haven for liturgical objects, books and archival documents from the defunct Jewish communities for the duration of the war. Thanks to the efforts of the art historian and chief curator Josef Polák and his colleagues, this institution operated on a completely professional level, creating the basis for the work of the present-day museum.
After the war, the museum was placed under national administration. The conditions laid down by the state meant that the Council of Jewish Religious Communities in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia – as the legal successor to the disbanded Jewish communities – was unable to take effective control of the museum before the Communist coup of February 1948.
In 1950 the museum was nationalized, including its extensive collections. Its subsequent work was affected by ideological pressure, which considerably restricted the range of permissible topics and the way they could be dealt with. In addition, the Communist state made it impossible for the museum to develop its specialist research activities.
The museum's research did not resume until 1994, when its buildings were returned to the Prague Jewish community and the bulk of its collections were returned by the state to the Federation of Jewish Communities in the Czech Republic. On 1 October 1994 the museum regained its independence from the state, marking the start of a new chapter in its more than hundred-year history.
*History of the Museum's Archives*
A small collection of valuable older documents acquired through purchases or donations was put together by the Museum before the Second World War. Most of the archival records were transferred to the Museum during the war as part of the wartime shipment of material from the disbanded Jewish communities of Bohemia and Moravia. This is why, apart from individual documents, the Museum has few records from the archives of Jewish communities in the annexed border area. Materials from other communities, too, have not always been sufficiently preserved; in some cases, only fragments of documents have survived. For many years, the archives only contained material from a particular historical period with only a few preserved documents dating from after 1945. It was not until 2006 – having been transferred to a modern air-conditioned depository with ample space capacity – that the archives began to collect more recent material, in particular the extant records of Jewish communities that were re-established after the Second World War.
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