"Seven boxes of Jewish material"
From looting and rediscovery in 1938 to the present day
June 5 to October 20, 2019
The exhibition cooperation between the Jewish Museum Munich and the Museum für Franken shows around 150 ritual objects from synagogues in Lower Franconia that bear witness to a lively Jewish life that was extinguished by the Shoah.
The objects on display were rediscovered in the depot of the Museum für Franken during the digital recording of the entire collection in 2016 and were viewed and researched by Bernhard Purin, Director of the Jewish Museum Munich. He was able to prove the origin of individual objects from the synagogues in Arnstein, Ebelsbach, Gochsheim, Heidingsfeld, Miltenberg, Schweinfurt and Würzburg. There they had been looted by representatives of the National Socialist regime during the November pogrom of 1938. It is not entirely clear how they ended up in the Main-Franconian Museum at the time. Their partially fragmented condition indicates that they arrived there before the destruction of the old museum building in 1945.
In 1947, the museum was supposed to hand over the looted property, described in sources at the time as "seven boxes of Jewish material", to the Offenbach Archival Depot, where the US Army collected Jewish property confiscated during the Nazi era. However, some of the confiscated property remained in the Würzburg museum depot. The exhibition is divided into four sections: the introductory section presents the history of the Franconian Luitpold Museum, renamed the Main-Franconian Museum in 1939, in which the "art and cultural-historical monuments of the Israelites in Franconia" had their place from the very beginning. In the next section, a long storage shelf containing objects that cannot be clearly assigned to a particular community is used to recreate their location in the museum cellar and demonstrate the diversity of the collection. This is followed by an impressive presentation of the objects that can be assigned to the Lower Franconian synagogues mentioned. Finally, the complete eradication of Jewish life in Lower Franconia by the National Socialists is commemorated.
Not only the exhibits, such as valuable Torah jewelry, Hanukkah candlesticks and Shabbat lamps, are the subject of the exhibition, but also the stories behind the exhibits, the history of the Jewish communities and the biographies of the donors of individual ritual objects. Many were murdered by the National Socialists, others managed to escape by emigrating. This exhibition aims to commemorate them and the objects so precious to them. The exhibition was sponsored by the German Center for the Loss of Cultural Property in Magdeburg and supported by the State Office for Non-State Museums in Bavaria.
An exhibition of the Jewish Museum Munich in cooperation with the Museum für Franken - Staatliches Museum für Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte, Würzburg, sponsored by the German Lost Art Foundation, supported by the Landesstelle für die nichtstaatlichen Museen in Bayern.
Catalog for the exhibition
"Seven boxes of Jewish material"
From looting and rediscovery in 1938 to the present day
Jewish Museum Munich, Museum for Franconia (ed.),
Hentrich & Hentrich Verlag, Berlin Leipzig 2018, 320 pages, 29.80 euros
ISBN: 978-3-95565-276-0.
