Metadata: Odessa’s Mendele Moykher-Sforim Museum of Jewish Culture
Collection
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- Odessa Museum of Local History
- Holding institution (official language):
- Одеський історико-краєзнавчий музей
- Postal address:
- Ukraine, 65026, Odesa, ul. Gavannaia
- Phone number:
- 380 (48) 725-52-02
- Web address:
- http://www.history.odessa.ua/
- Email:
- orhmuseum@gmail.com
- Title:
- Odessa’s Mendele Moykher-Sforim Museum of Jewish Culture
- Title (official language):
- [Одеський музей єврейської культури ім. Менделе Мойхер-Сфоріма]
- Creator/accumulator:
- Odessa’s Mendele Moykher-Sforim Museum of Jewish Culture
- Date(s):
- 1941/1952
- Language:
- Russian
- Ukrainian
- Yiddish
- Extent:
- 15 storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Scope and content:
- The fonds “Documents from 1946 to the Present” includes a set of materials on Odessa’s Mendele Moykher-Sforim Museum of Jewish Culture, divided into two groups: 1) Inventories of decorative and applied artwork and synagogue vessels that were evacuated from Odessa to Ufa in 1941, and 2) documents on the transfer of the former museum’s exhibit items to the Kiev State Historical Museum in 1952. The latter group includes orders and official correspondence between the Ukrainian SSR Council of Ministers’ committee on cultural-educational institutions and the Odessa State Archeological Museum on sending exhibit items of the former Odessa Museum of Jewish Culture to the Kiev State Historical Museum; inspection certificates and proceedings of an examination of 230 items of precious metal, and inventories thereof; recommendations of the Odessa Assaying Inspectorate regarding the results of an inspection of the inventory and preservation of precious metal exhibit items at the Odessa State Archeological Museum; a log registering the receipt of three packages submitted to the Odessa Regional Department of Special Communications for shipment to the Kiev State Historical Museum; etc.
- Archival history:
- The Odessa Museum of Local History was established by decree (21 April 1955) of the Ukrainian SSR Council of Ministers; it was based on the Heroic Defense of Odessa Museum and a museum of local history, and also absorbed the fonds of such other city museum institutions as the Odessa Municipal Museum of Antiquities (1825), the Odessa History and Antiquities Society (1839), the Count M. Tolstoi Hall of the Odessa City Public Library (1907), and the Old Odessa and Stepova Ukraїna museums (1925). The collection of the Odessa Museum of Local History currently numbers over 120,000 exhibit items, including 40,000 documents and photographs, as well as graphic works and portraiture of the 18th-early 20th centuries; collections of icons, weapons, and items from everyday life; numismatic and cartographic materials; etc. Materials on Jewish history and culture are housed in the museum’s single fonds, but are systematised in various inventory storage groups (“Documents”; “Print Editions”; “Photographs”; “Negatives”; “Maps”; etc.); this description thus refers to an approximate collection.
- Administrative/biographical history:
- Odessa’s Mendele Moykher-Sforim Museum of Jewish Culture was established on the initiative of the Odessa Area Department of Political Education; it was opened 6 November 1927. Its official title was the Mendele Moykher-Sforim First All-Ukrainian Museum of Jewish Culture. Key figures in its foundation and development were P. M. Segal (1886-1955) and the Jewish scholar and public figure B. M. Rubshtein (1882-1934), who was its first director. It was subsidised by the city budget. It consisted of four sections: the history, antireligious, theatre and art, and literary departments. It had a considerable quantity of valuable exhibit items (over 30,000 in 1937), which museum staff members were able to collect in a brief period of time during expeditions in areas of the former Pale of Settlement, and thanks to active support from the Jewish public in the form of numerous correspondents and friends-of-the-museum groups in the USSR and abroad. These exhibit items included the archives of Jewish writers (Mendele Moykher-Sforim himself, and I. J. Linetskii) and of the Odessa branch of the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews (OPE), the Jewish Public Committee to Aid Victims of the War and Pogroms (Evobshchestkom), and the Boguslav Jewish self-defence organisation; a collection of pinkasim (document registers of Jewish communities); a valuable collection of painting and graphic art, including works by Marc Chagall, A. Tyshler, I. B. Rybak, and A. Manevich; synagogue vessels; items from everyday life; etc. The museum operated off and on (for example, it was closed between 1934-40) until 1941. The fate of a significant portion of its collection (items removed in the 1930s, and looted during the German-Romanian occupation of Odessa) remains unknown. In the 1930s, several archival fonds were transferred to the State Archive of the Odessa Region; and in the postwar years, the collection of applied artwork and jewellery wound up in the Odessa Archeological Museum, from which it was transferred in 1952 to the Kiev State Historical Museum (now the National Ukrainian History Museum), and in 1964, to the Museum of Historical Jewelry of Ukraine (now a branch of the National Ukrainian History Museum).
- Subject terms:
- Art
- Correspondence
- Museums
- Synagogues
- System of arrangement:
- Materials on Jewish history and culture are housed in the museum’s single fonds according to various inventory storage groups (“Documents”; “Print Editions”; “Photographs”; “Negatives”; “Maps”; etc.).
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary
