Metadata: Collection of the Migdal-Shorashim Museum of the History of the Jews of Odessa
Collection
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- The Migdal-Shorashim Museum of the History of the Jews of Odessa
- Holding institution (official language):
- Музей історії євреїв Одеси «Мігдаль-Шорашим»
- Postal address:
- Nejinskaya Street, 66, Odessa, Ukraine
- Phone number:
- 380 (48) 728-97-43
- Web address:
- https://english.migdal.org.ua/museum/
- Email:
- museum@migdal.ru
- Title:
- Collection of the Migdal-Shorashim Museum of the History of the Jews of Odessa
- Date(s):
- 1880s/2000s
- Language:
- Russian
- English
- Hebrew
- Yiddish
- German
- Romanian; Moldavian; Moldovan
- Ukrainian
- Extent:
- over 14,000 storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Photographic images
- Audio
- Physical condition:
- good
- Scope and content:
-
The museum’s fonds include household and ritual items, paintings, works of graphic and theatrical and decorative art, popular-science films, and print publications (including periodicals), as well as a significant quantity of original and photocopied documentary materials (manuscripts, photographs, cards, etc.) that may conventionally be divided into the following thematic groups:
1) Documents that shed light on the socioeconomic situation and socio-demographic stratification of the Jewish population of Odessa from the early nineteenth century to the 1910s, and on the migration of the “Brody Jews,” including documents pertaining to prominent representatives of Odessa Jewry of the time: the merchant of the 1st guild Vul’f Konstantinovskii, a philanthropist active in the community; A. M. Brodskii, honorary citizen of the city of Odessa and the first chairman of the Odessa branch of the Society for the Promotion of Culture among the Jews (OPE); Odessa physicians, journalists (including Vladimir Jabotinsky), lawyers, entrepreneurs, engineers, etc.
2) Various materials on Jewish institutions and organisations, charities, and professional associations, mainly from 1890-1920s, including on Odessa’s Jewish hospital; the Odessa Jewish publishing house Moriah (books by Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, I. Ravnitsky, S. Tchernichovsky, Shimen Frug, and others, with stamps and stickers from Jewish libraries of Odessa); Jewish educational institutions of Odessa (including the Jewish vocational school of the Trud [Labor] society); the Society of Lovers of the Hebrew Language (a list of members of its Odessa branch appended to a notification of the Odessa city prefect of 23 March 1912 on this society’s founding, signed by Menaḥem Ussishkin, S. Barbash, and M. Kleiman); a memorandum of 11 April 1908 on letterhead of the Committee for the Society to Aid Jewish Farmers and Craftsmen in Syria and Palestine on allocating funds raised to benefit that association, signed by Menaḥem Ussishkin; postcards and photographs of Odessa synagogues and cemeteries, and a selection of materials on the pogroms against Jews that took place in Odessa in 1871 and 1905; and lists of addresses of various Jewish institutions and organisations, and a set of photographs (taken in 2003 by L. Nuzhnyi) of buildings belonging to them that have survived.
3) Photographs received by Israel’s Jewish Diaspora Museum printed from photographic plates and negatives that were made in Odessa in the 1900s-1910s and that are now housed in various collections in Israel. These include portraits and group photographs of such prominent Jewish figures as Ahad Ha’am, B. Borokhov, Ḥayim Naḥman Bialik, A. Druyanov, Simon Dubnow, Vladimir Jabotinsky, I. Klauzner, M. Lilienblum, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, I. Ravnitsky, Menaḥem Ussishkin, Kh. Tchernowitz, S. Tchernichovsky, Z. Shneur, Sholom Aleichem, L. El-Khanan, writers for the journal Hashiloah (1896-1902), and staff members of the Moriah publishing house; members of a 1905 Jewish self-defence squad; Zionists departing for Palestine on the steamship Ruslan in 1919; etc.
4) Materials on the involvement of Jews in revolutionary events in Odessa in 1917-20s, and in particular, manuscript documents of the Odessa committee of the United Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party (Fareynikte); a homemade album dedicated to A. M. Broer, organiser and sotnik [lieutenant] of the Aleksandr district (city of Odessa) division of the Red Guard, with materials bound together: newspaper clippings and copies of documents, photographs, and eight drawings by the artists Gorinshtein and Krylov depicting events of 1917-18 for use in a series of postcards designed in 1931 (but which were not published).
5) Materials related to the operation of Jewish organisations and institutions in Odessa in the 1920s-30s (general-education schools; Jewish sectors of several departments of the Odessa Educational Institute; the Odessa Jewish Mechanical Technicum; the Odessa branch of the Union of Societies for Handicraft and Agricultural Work among Jews [ORT-Farband]; the Odessa State Yiddish Theater; etc.); the Mendele Moykher-Sforim All-Ukrainian Museum of Jewish Culture (clippings from periodicals and a copy of the museum’s annual report for 1928-29 from fonds of the State Archive of the Odessa Region); several enterprises not formally called Jewish, but whose materials are sealed with Yiddish-language stamps; documents (including copies from fonds of the State Archive of the Odessa Region) on the activities of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) and Agro-Joint in Odessa and Ukraine in the 1920s (business correspondence, summaries, staff lists, office and branch addresses, photographs, etc.). There is also a set of materials (over 200 storage units) dealing with the operations of the music courses (from the 1900s on) and school (from 1933 on) of the violinist and teacher P. S. Stoliarskii, including documents written by Stoliarskii on school letterhead (1935); concert programs; newspaper clippings of reviews and jubilee articles; greeting telegrams; photographs of teachers and pupils of the Stoliarskii school from various years (M. Vainman, Elizaveta and Emil’ Gilel’s, E. Mogilevskii, D. Oistrakh, etc.); and a collection of phonograph records (in Yiddish) from the 1920s-30s.
6) There is a separate set of documents on the history of the Holocaust in the Odessa region; this includes leaflets, signs, postcards, and personal documents and photographs of Jewish victims of the Holocaust (including the sisters M. G. and G. F. Gurevich, who perished in the Slobodka ghetto); materials on Jewish participants in military operations (frontline newspapers, letters, diaries, photographs, identification papers, Red Navy service records, injury and military service certificates, commendation documents, service records, evaluations, death notices, etc.); copies of documents from fonds of the State Archive of the Odessa Region and Moscow archives; photographs of locations of mass executions, and of monuments and commemorative signs, etc. (some of these, stored separately, were provided by L. M. Dusman, who for many years studied the history of the Holocaust in Odessa); manuscript and typewritten copies of materials of a memoiristic and historical nature, including the memoir of Liudmila Kalika (Israel) entitled “Odessa: 830 Days Underground” (with photographs of family members and a chart of the basement they hid in from different years); and of S. Ia. Borovoi’s article “The Destruction of the Jewish Population of Odessa during the Fascist Occupation” (with the author’s corrections); analogous materials, including photographs, testimonials, and memoirs of former prisoners of ghettos and concentration camps and their family members who had emigrated to the US, from San Francisco resident L. Dumer’s “home museum” of the history of the Holocaust in Odessa; small-circulation local publications of a memoiristic and local-historical nature that deal with Holocaust history, with commemorative inscriptions by their authors; materials stored in the course of the work of a monthly seminar for teachers, university students, and schoolchildren on the history of the Holocaust; etc.
7) Letters and documents from the postwar period (1940s – early 1980s) that deal with the problems experienced by Jews as they returned from evacuation; the rise in everyday and official anti-Semitism; the professional orientation of Jews (scholars, physicians, artists, journalists, shipping company and seaport workers, etc.); materials pertaining to Jews’ involvement in the dissident movement: samizdat copies of prayer-books and teach-yourself-Hebrew books; a sentence pronounced 18 March 1968 in the case of D. I. Naidis, convicted for writing poetry that he read to friends and making and distributing leaflets in August 1967 “that libeled Soviet reality with regard to the nationalities issue”; photographs (late 1970s – early 1980s) of ruins and fragmentary headstones of the second Jewish cemetery (which was bulldozed in 1978), and architectural plans and explications connected with a project to build a memorial on its territory to Odessa’s Jewish victims of the pogrom of 1905 and the Holocaust.
8) Documents reflecting the renaissance of Jewish ethnic self-consciousness and the establishment of Jewish institutions, including posters, booklets, photographs, and audio- and videocassettes (from the late 1980s to the present), and also pertaining to modern manifestations of political anti-Semitism, and in particular, anti-Semitic leaflets and signs that were disseminated in Odessa in 2004-06; materials from a seminar for personnel of Jewish museum programmes in southern Ukraine on the history of Jews in Evpatoriia, Kerch’, Kirovograd, Nikolaev, Sevastopol’, Simferopol’, Feodosiia, Kherson, and Yalta (copies of documents, photographs, and manuscripts).
A significant portion of the museum’s collections consists of personal and family archives, which are systematised (in inventories) by collection creator (but not formally divided into separate fonds). The above-mentioned materials on the Holocaust in the Odessa region, moreover, are kept and exhibited separately only in cases in which they are not part of a complete personal or family archive. Below are annotations on some of the most significant of the personal and family archives.
Archive of the Kogan-Shats Acting Dynasty (1900/1950s): Included are materials on Jewish actors and the Odessa State Yiddish Theater, including R. B. Kogan’s membership card (no. 143) for the All-Russian Labor Union of Jewish Actors and Chorus-Members; photographs of the actor B. I. Kogan-Shats; an Odessa State Yiddish Theater troupe performing on tour in Leningrad; Klara Gartova (Sadetskaia) as Hava in Sholom Aleichem’s play Tevye the Dairyman; V. B. Kogan-Shats as Stempenyu; the State Yiddish Theater actors G. Ginzburg, V. Shvartser, etc.; the final scene from the play Freylekhs, performed at the Odessa Railway Workers’ Club (1948-49?) by a combined cast from the Kiev, Khar’kov, Chernovtsy, and Odessa Yiddish Theaters; etc.
Archive of the Iglitskii Family: Included are materials on the activities of M. M. Iglitskii (paternal grandfather of E. S. Iglitskii, the collection creator), who established and served as director of a private Jewish secondary school [gimnaziia] in Odessa; his son, I. M. Iglitskii, who was shot during a student demonstration at Novorossiia University in 1910; Samuil Pen (E. S. Iglitskii’s maternal grandfather), an attorney, historian, and public commentator and figure; and photographs of other members of the family.
Archive of the Krantsfel’d Family (1880/1950s): Included are materials of two doctors: D. I. Krantsfel’d, who worked under I. I. Mechnikov at the Odessa Bacteriological Station, and later established the Elisavetgrad Bacteriological Station; and his brother M. I. Krantsfel’d, an Odessa health officer and professor at Novorossiia University; as one of the founders of the International Anti-Tuberculosis Association, the latter opened an anti-tuberculosis and recuperative sanatorium in 1901 “for the poorest Jewish children.”
Archive of the Minkus-Nudel’man Family (1860/2000s): This archive was transferred to the museum by Academician B. A. Minkus (1904-2004), and contains paintings and graphic artwork of Jewish artists of Odessa (1930s-70s), including B. A. Minkus’s wife R. E. Nudel’man (1914-95), whose works include the only portrait made of Prof. S. Ia. Borovoi during his lifetime; numerous photographs of family members, including B. A. Minkus’s great-grandfather Moisei Shtifel’man (1865, 1876), a cloth merchant and parnas [warden or board-member] of the Peresyp’ synagogue; his daughter, a teacher at an Odessa Jewish school; and children of the Minkus family celebrating Hanukkah at the sanatorium of Ia. U. Landesman (1914); B. A. Minkus’s uncle, the architect F. A. Troupianskii, who, in particular, constructed the building of the Jewish Clerks’ Society and Union Hall on Troitskaia Street, the memorial (at Odessa’s second Jewish cemetery) to the victims of the October 1905 pogrom, the building of the Stoliarskii school, etc.; photographs (1910-70s) of B. A. Minkus’s mother K. I. Minkus, who taught at an Odessa Jewish school, and his father the architect A. B. Minkus, who designed the complex of the second Jewish cemetery and oversaw the reconstruction of the Brody Synagogue (which involved installing an organ); eight original floor plans, crosscuts, and front views of the Brody Synagogue made by A. B. Minkus in 1908; photographs (1930-70s) of friends of the family, including S. Ia. Borovoi, and of the ninety-nine-year-old B. A. Minkus as he gave a report at the Odessa and Jewish Civilization conference held at the Odessa Scholars’ House in honour of the hundredth anniversary of S. Ia. Borovoi’s birth (2003).
Archive of the Birman Family (1910/1930s): Materials include photographs and documents pertaining to the activities of Mordko Birman, an employee (in 1922-23) of the Odessa branch of the Joint Distribution Committee.
Archive of the Litovchenko Family: Materials housed pertaining to the activities of the collection creator V. V. Litovchenko’s aunt, Odessa Conservatory Prof. L. N. Ginzburg (photographs, posters, signed books, manuscript drafts of concert programmes), include a set of documents pertaining to a court case involving M. N. Ginzburg-Litovchenko (the collection creator’s mother), who had been charged with concealing her Jewish origin (1942).
There are also materials transferred by the collection creator’s wife N. A. Litovcheno from the archive of her father, Prof. A. A. Nedzvedskii, including clippings from Odessa newspapers with anti-Semitic content during the German-Romanian occupation; letters from Jewish journalists of Odessa requesting assistance with their return from evacuation; and caricatures of the Odessa Jewish writers G. Koltunov, B. Vershadskii, and others made by the artist M. Mel’man.
Archive of the Buzdes-Perchuk Family (1930/1970s): Included are photographs and documents pertaining to the period of Anna Perchuk’s study at the school of P. S. Stoliarskii, including some handwritten by Stoliarskii himself, and connected with Anna Perchuk’s time interned in a ghetto and her involvement with artists’ brigades at the front after her liberation.
Archive of E. M. Glazer-Kanevskaia: This contains photographs of members of her family from the period of the 1910s through 1941 (fifteen of sixteen family members perished during the occupation of the Odessa region), and an official writ (9 October 1943) “On unsealing the apartment of, and inspecting the property located in it that had belonged to, the Jew Sara Gleizer” (the doctor S. M. Glazer was shot at the age of twenty-four in 1942 in the village of Mostovoe (now in the Domanivka/Domanevka district, Mykolaiv/Nikolaev region).
Archive of the Shevalev Family: The Shevalev family archive includes documents of Prof. E. A. Shevalev, who during the German-Romanian occupation of Odessa headed the local psychiatric hospital, and of his son A. E. Shevalev, a student of biology (later a professor of Odessa University). These two men saved hundreds of Jewish patients and hospital staff-members from death, for which they were later awarded the title “Righteous among the Nations.” The Shevalev family archive houses, among other things, documents, photographs, and other materials related to the Shevalevs’ activities at the Odessa Psychiatric Hospital in 1941-44; A. E. Shevalev’s correspondence with Israel’s Yad Vashem Institute; a “Righteous among the Nations” certificate and medal; publications from the Odessa and foreign press; video-memoirs of A. E. Shevalev (including recordings designated for Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation); etc.
The museum’s reference fonds houses materials collected during the preparation of several publications, including over 200 documents from the State Archive of the Odessa Region designated for the book The Jews of Odessa and Southern Ukraine: A History in Documents. Book 1 (Late 18th – Early 20th c.) (Odessa, 2002); and over 1,000 documents for the book The History of the Holocaust in the Odessa Region. A Collection of Articles and Documents (Odessa, 2006) (a significant portion of which were not included in the latter publication). These documents are annotated in the descriptions of corresponding fonds of the State Archive of the Odessa Region.
- Archival history:
- The Migdal-Shorashim Museum of the History of the Jews of Odessa, a branch of the international organisation Migdal International Centre of Jewish Community Programs, was opened 12 November 2002. The museum engages in all forms of museum activity: systematisation and collection, research and education, exhibition, publishing, etc.
- Access points: locations:
- Evpatoriia
- Feodosiia
- Israel
- Kerch’
- Kherson
- Kirovograd
- Moscow
- Mostovoe
- Nikolaev
- Odessa
- Sevastopol’
- Simferopol’
- Ukraine
- Yalta
- Access points: persons/families:
- Ahad Ha’am
- Barbash, S.
- Birman family
- Birman, Mordko
- Borokhov, B.
- Borovoi, S. Ia.
- Brodskii, A. M.
- Broer, A. M.
- Buzdes-Perchuk family
- Druyanov, A.
- Dusman, L. M.
- El-Khanan, L.
- Gartova, Klara
- Gilel’s, Elizaveta
- Gilel’s, Emil’
- Ginzburg-Litovchenko, M. N.
- Ginzburg, G.
- Ginzburg, L. N.
- Glazer-Kanevskaia, E. M.
- Gleizer, Sara M.
- Gorinshtein
- Gurevich, G. F.
- Iglitskii family
- Iglitskii, E. S.
- Iglitskii, I. M.
- Iglitskii, M. M.
- Kalika, Liudmila
- Klauzner, I.
- Kleiman, M.
- Kogan-Shats family
- Kogan-Shats, B. I.
- Kogan-Shats, V. B.
- Kogan, R. B.
- Koltunov, G.
- Konstantinovskii, Vul’f
- Krantsfel’d family
- Krantsfel’d, D. I.
- Krantsfel’d, M. I.
- Krylov
- Landesman, Ia. U.
- Lilienblum, M.
- Litovchenko family
- Litovchenko, V. V.
- Litovcheno, N. A.
- Mechnikov, I. I.
- Mel’man, M.
- Mendele Moykher-Sforim
- Minkus-Nudel’man family
- Minkus, A. B.
- Minkus, B. A.
- Minkus, K. I.
- Mogilevskii, E.
- Naidis, D. I.
- Nedzvedskii, A. A.
- Nudel’man, R. E.
- Nuzhny, L.
- Oistrakh, D.
- Pen, Samuil
- Perchuk, Anna
- Ravnitsky, I.
- Shevalev family
- Shevalev, A. E.
- Shevalev, E. A.
- Shneur, Z.
- Sholem Aleichem
- Shtifel’man, Moisei
- Shvartser, V.
- Stoliarskii, P. S.
- Tchernichovsky, S.
- Tchernowitz, Ch.
- Troupianskii, F. A.
- Ussishkin, M.
- Vainman, M.
- Vershadskii, B.
- Subject terms:
- American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
- Antisemitism
- Art
- Art--Artists
- Cemeteries
- Cemeteries--Gravestones
- Ceremonial objects
- Correspondence
- Diaries
- Drawings
- Education
- Education--Vocational training
- Film
- Health and medical matters
- Health and medical matters--Diseases
- Health and medical matters--Physicians and nurses
- Historical research
- Holocaust
- Holocaust--Concentration camps
- Holocaust--Ghettos
- Holocaust--Righteous Among the Nations
- Jewish daily life and religious practices
- Jewish languages
- Jewish languages--Yiddish
- Libraries
- Literature
- Literature--Writers, poets, and playwrights
- Manuscripts
- Mass murder
- Memoirs
- Museums
- Music
- Newspaper clippings
- ORT (Organisation for Rehabilitation through training)
- Paintings
- Personal records
- Photographs
- Pogroms
- Posters
- Professions
- Publishing
- Synagogues
- Testimony
- Theatre
- Zionism
- Zionism--Zionists
- System of arrangement:
- All items held by the museum are divided into three fonds: the main fonds (which contains over 4,000 storage units); the reference fonds (over 10,000 storage units, mainly copies); and the temporary fonds (materials transferred for exhibition or publication). There is also a system of organisation by sections titled “Exposition” and “Fonds,” a computer database of the materials held in the main and reference fonds, and a card catalogue of persons, organisations, and institutions.
- Finding aids:
- computer database; card catalogue.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary