Metadata: Materials of Maximilian Goldstein
Collection
- Country:
- Ukraine
- Holding institution:
- Institute for the Study of Library Art Resources of the Vasyl Stefanyk National Scientific Library of Ukraine in Lviv
- Holding institution (official language):
- Інститут досліджень бібліотечних мистецьких ресурсів Львівської національної наукової бібліотеки імені Василя Стефаника
- Postal address:
- ul. Bіblіotechna 2, 79000, Lviv
- Phone number:
- +38 (032) 261-55-20
- Title:
- Materials of Maximilian Goldstein
- Title (official language):
- Матеріали Максиміліана Гольдштейна
- Creator/accumulator:
- Goldstein, Maximilian
- Date(s):
- 1879/1937
- Language:
- Polish
- German
- Hebrew
- Extent:
- over 130 archival storage units
- Type of material:
- Textual material
- Photographic images
- Scope and content:
-
The materials of Maximilian Goldstein may be provisionally divided into three sets of documents:
1) Materials pertaining to Maximilian Goldstein’s research on the famous Lemberg/Lwów jeweller Baruch Dornhelm (1858-1928), which include drafts and fair copies of an article on Dornhelm, as well as Goldstein’s research notes on him; Goldstein’s correspondence with relatives of Dornhelm, which includes information on him, as well as with the Greek Catholic Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky on silver items by Dornhelm in the metropolitan’s possession; and other authors’ articles on Baruch Dornhelm published in Lwów newspapers of the 1930s, and correspondence with these authors.
2) The Goldstein family’s commemorative album, which Maximilian Goldstein created after the death of his father Herman Goldstein (1854-1932). This is a hardcover album; pasted onto its pages are photographs of the Goldstein family (individual, wedding, and group photos) and of the tombstones of relations of M. Goldstein buried at Lwów’s old Jewish cemetery, which was destroyed in the 1940s by the German and Soviet authorities, and a typewritten text containing biographical information about Herman Goldstein. There is also a printed copy of the charter of the tax-free loan foundation for real estate agents that Herman Goldstein established in 1908; clippings from Lemberg/Lwów newspapers that make reference to his philanthropic donations; the obituary of Maximilian Goldstein’s mother Eliza Goldstein, as well as of her parents Sarah and Jonas Baumov.
3) Materials deposited in this collection in the course of the organisation of a Jewish art exhibition that took place at the Lwów Museum of Arts and Crafts in March 1933. These include documentation on the transfer, by Jewish religious, educational, and public institutions, and by individual representatives of the Jewish communities of Lwów and Tarnopol (now Ternopil), of materials to be exhibited at the Lwów Museum of Arts and Crafts; workings lists of exhibit items; a letter from the museum to the directors of the Lwów Jewish Library requesting that Hebrew manuscripts and illuminated Haggadah texts from before 1600 be provided for the exhibit; letters from particular institutions to the museum’s administration requesting the return of exhibited materials; etc. (Maximilian Goldstein worked with this set of documents in 1940-42, when, due to the Soviet authorities’ closure of the Jewish Museum and the German occupation authorities’ subsequent transfer of its holdings, including the personal collection of Goldstein himself, to the Lwów Museum of Arts and Crafts, Goldstein described and inventoried them.)
In addition to the documents listed above, the collection also contains a letter from the Lemberg/Lwów Jewish hospital to the administration of the Jewish community’s foundation on completing construction of a building on a plot of land adjacent to the Golden Rose Synagogue (1913); and a letter from the Lwów branch of the Society for the Protection of the Health of the Jewish Population (OZE) to the administration of the Jewish Museum requesting that a room be provided for a series of lectures by the OZE science department (1937).
- Archival history:
- The Institute for the Study of Library Art Resources is an independent research subdivision of the Vasyl Stefanyk National Scientific Library of Ukraine in Lviv of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. The institute currently houses unique collections of works of fine art, photo documents, music manuscripts, documents from personal archives and collections, and publications in art history and criticism from the 15th to the 21st century.
- Administrative/biographical history:
- Maximilian Goldstein (1880-1942?) was a Jewish collector, art historian, and expert in numismatics, orders and medals, and Jewish art. He was born in Lemberg/Lwów, and worked as an employee in that city’s branches of Vienna- and Warsaw-based banking institutions. He was a member of the Numismatic Society of Vienna and the Union of Bookplate Art and Applied Graphics of Germany (Deutscher Verein für Exlibriskunst und Gebrauchsgraphik). Over the course of many years of collecting, he came to possess valuable collections of coins, orders and medals, and items of Judaica, including works of Jewish folk art, as well as a large specialised library. Numbering several thousand items, and housed in his private apartment (at 15 Novyi Svet Street), these collections were available to the public. In early 1910, M. Goldstein took the initiative in proposing that the Lemberg/Lwów Jewish community open Galicia’s first Jewish museum (this would be opened in May 1934). In 1935 in Lwów, he published (with his own funding) the book The Culture and Art of the Jewish People in the Polish Lands. The Collections of M. Goldstein (Kultura i sztuka ludu Żydowskiego na ziemiach polskich. Zbiory M. Goldsteina) in collaboration with the poet, critic, and literary scholar K. Dresdner (1908-43). Upon the Soviet annexation of Western Ukraine, Goldstein, who had just prior to this been appointed acting director of the Jewish Museum, became an employee of the L’vov/L’viv Museum of Arts and Crafts, where he catalogued and inventoried the collection of the Jewish Museum, which was liquidated by the Soviet authorities in the fall of 1939 (and whose materials were transferred to the Museum of Arts and Crafts in February 1940). He also transferred his own collection of Judaica for storage at the Museum of Arts and Crafts when, during the German occupation of Lwów, he and his family were sent to the ghetto. At the request of the directors of the Museum of Arts and Crafts and representatives of several other museum institutions of Lwów, Goldstein received a certificate from the occupying authorities that enabled him not only to continue his inventorying and description of the Jewish collections, but also to temporarily defer his deportation to a German concentration camp, where, however, he is thought to have perished.
- Subject terms:
- Aid and relief
- Aid and relief--Philanthropy and charity
- Cemeteries
- Cemeteries--Gravestones
- Correspondence
- Exhibitions
- Haggadot
- Health and medical matters
- Health and medical matters--Hospitals
- Historical research
- Libraries
- Manuscripts
- Museums
- Newspaper clippings
- Photographs
- Professions
- Professions--Jewellers and goldsmiths
- System of arrangement:
- The fonds has not been arranged.
- Yerusha Network member:
- Jewish Theological Seminary
