The Jewish Museum in Prague During the Second World War

Abstract

The Jewish Museum in Prague has as many as 40,000 items in its collections, the uniqueness of which is underlined by the exceptional circumstances under which most of them were acquired by the museum. Nearly all of the items were confiscated during the Second World War from Jews who were sent to concentration camps and from Jewish communities that were closed down. Many visitors share the commonly held view that the Nazis brought Jewish ritual objects from the whole of occupied Europe to Prague so that after their victory they could create a 'museum of an extinct race'. In reality, however, things were not that simple and what seems to be an attested and undoubted fact is more like a self-perpetuating legend. The issues relating to the war-time Jewish Museum in Prague have recently been covered in detail by my colleague Magda Veselska, who specializes in the history of our institution and its prominent personages and who describes the fate of its collection of Torah scrolls.