Acquisitions in 2018

2018 was a year of major purchases.

These included a “residence permit for a Jew in Lyon” dated 10 May 1782 and recalling the validity until the Revolution of the edict expelling Jews from France promulgated in 1394, an illuminated parchment “for the redemption of the newborn”, photographs of the creation of Tel Aviv, period prints of photographs by Walter Zadek (1900-1992) of Mandatory Palestine and the fledgling state of Israel, several works and documents illustrating Yiddish culture (newspapers, illustrated books, postcards of Yiddish theatre), a poster by Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874-1925), a self-portrait by Emmanuel Mané-Katz (1894-1962), a drawing by Boris Taslitzky (1911-2005) done in secret at Buchenwald in 1945 and complementing the major donation by his daughter in 2017, three posters from the 1970s showing the solidarity of French Jews with the Jews in the Soviet Union.

In September 2018, the mahJ succeeded in acquiring the only panel missing from the exceptional tabernacle (sukkah) bought at auction in December 1988, the first acquisition for the future museum’s collection. Thirty years later, this major exhibit illustrating the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot) is now complete. This sukkah with its rare painted decoration was created for a wealthy family in Austria or southern Germany in the early 19th century. Its thirty-seven pinewood panels are set in a frame at the top and bottom. The interior is decorated with a view of the city of Jerusalem, a pastoral Central European scene with a village by a lake, and a shield inscribed with the first words of the Decalogue. With the addition of the sukkah’s sixteenth panel, acquired with the aid of the Fondation Pro mahJ and the Fonds régional d’acquisition des musées, this extremely rare masterpiece and its Germanic landscape are at last complete.   

The mahJ also succeeded in acquiring two collections of photographs (one concerning the Jewish theatre in Moscow and the other the immigration of Moroccan Jews in Israel) and two major postcard collections (one showing the Holy Land and the other Jewish life in North Africa). Four drawings by Henri Berlewi (1894-1967) depicting workers and scenes from traditional Jewish life have further enhanced the museum’s now major collection of this artist’s work. The other acquisitions were wide-ranging: Judaica, including an illuminated marriage contract on parchment from Bayonne (1728), the first from this community to join the mahJ’s collection, a poster dating from the 1930s mobilising French public opinion against the exiling of German Jews, a drawing by Édouard Couturier (1871-1903) mocking the criminologist Alphonse Bertillon’s improbable assertion at the trial in Rennes in 1899 that Alfred Dreyfus could have forged the “bordereau”. 

The year ended with the acquisition of a panel of polychrome ceramic tiles produced by the Chemla Brothers (Tunis, 1920s), complementing the exceptional collection of pottery, models and copper matrixes donated by the Chemla family.