Exhibition of Galicia Jews to be opened in Lviv

The exposition “Relics of the Jewish World of Galicia” will open on March 28 at the Museum of Ethnography and Arts of the Institute of Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (15 Svobody avenue).

According to Andriy Kolot, the head of the Institutes’ exhibition sector, this will be a unique and large-scale show dedicated to the 85th anniversary of the Exhibition of Jewish Arts, which was deployed in the halls of the City Industrial Museum in Lviv in March 1933, where they presented the monuments as private collections, as well as from the synagogues of Galicia, UNIAN reports.

“This exhibition has formed in the society an understanding of the need to create a Jewish museum, which was solemnly opened a year later, in 1939 the museum was liquidated, and in February 1940 the collection was transferred to the Museum of Fine Arts. With the outbreak of the Second World War, a collection of Maximilian Goldstein, which, for the sake of preservation, was transferred by Goldstein in July 1941 to the same museum as a deposit, is threatened with destruction. Thus, the Museum of Fine Arts created the largest and most high-quality Judaic collection of that time, which after 1951 was inherited by the State Museum of Ethnography and Arts of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR,” Andriy Kalatay said.

The exposition " Relics of the Jewish World of Galicia” is arranged in five halls. The presented rarities convey the sacral atmosphere of the synagogue, the annual cycle of religious Jewish holidays, and the products of various crafts. Separate halls will be dedicated to the famous collector of Jewish antiquities of Maximilian Goldstein and his collection of exlibris, traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirts and graphics.

A part of the monuments of its time was presented at the exhibition in 1933, but most of the exhibits will be shown to visitors for the first time. The project “Relics of the Jewish World of Galicia” will be held with the financial support of the All-Ukrainian Charitable Jewish Foundation “Hesed-Arieh” and the Center for Jewish Studies at the Northwestern University’s  Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies.