The Jewish Museum of Budapest [antikvár]

THE HISTORY OF THE MUSEUM In 1896, Hungary celebrated her millennium by organizing a great exhibition. At this exhibition, the Churches introduced their artifacts. The Jewish community was represented by ninety pieces. Though this number is praiseworthy, the exhibited articles were rather poor. There were no truly antique pieces among them and those that were exhibited as such could not pass close scrutiny. Few were also the artistic exhibits. One of the reports on the exhibition' deals at length with the question of why Jews have no genuinely antique and artistic ritual objects. The Biblical command, "You shall make no graven images," has been misunderstood for centuries by Jews of the Middle Ages and modern times, thereby hindering the development of Jewish art. Indeed, they made no "graven images", neither statues, nor portraits. Furthermore, even those old congregations in Hungary whose history can be traced back for many hundreds of years ceased functioning from time to time during Jewish persecutions; their synagogues were destroyed, and their ritual objects disappeared. Both congregations and private individuals had sent material to the Millennial Exhibition. However, the organizers—for reasons unknown—exhibited the inferior exemplars and rejected the superior items. Still, a few significant items were included, such as the manuscript of Izsák Schulhof who had been present at the liberation of Buda from the Turks and, in his memoirs, described the battles as they took place, the fate of Buda's Jews, and his own.^ But the majority of the material, in form and in execution, was almost primitive. Another report of the Exhibition^ also stresses that there are few hundred-year-old ritual objects in Hungary not only because the old synagogues had been destroyed, but their equipment—according to the author—had been rudimentary to begin with. On one occasion, before the Millennial Exhibition, the general public could have seen Jewish ritual objects at the National Historical Silverware Exhibition of 1884. It seems, however, that this very early first Jewish exhibition received less attention than the exhibition of 1896. From the point of view of our Museum, the Jewish material of the Millennial Exhibition, though ever so primitive, has a very important and significant role. The author of the second report was Miksa Szabolcsi, the editor of Egyenlőség (Equality), the popular weekly. The plan of establishing a Jewish museum occurs to Szabolcsi in connection with the Millennial Exhibition. The thought comes to him that everything exhibited and everything rejected in the Exhibition ought to be kept together. "However poor we are in data referring to the past, the exhibited and not exhibited but submitted material together contains invaluable material on our history. The interesting and valuable part: manuscripts, documents, books were scattered far and wide before they could be collected, and all that did get shown will also be scattered in a few weeks—and we are so very poor in historical data! Perhaps we could keep the things that are together and enrich them with those that did not get selected lor the Exhibition." Further, even more concretely: "Let us create a storehouse of Jewish collections whose foundation would be the exhibited and rejected (we repeat: these are the more valuable) articles and it will be the responsibility of the future to enrich it and make it famous." Further in his report. Szabolcsi is confident that "not a few locked cabinets which hold valuable Jewish antiques not sent to the Exhibition will be opened to pass them on willingly to the Jewish Museum".« This is where Szabolcsi first mentions the idea and plan of a Jewish Museum to be founded in Budapest. Many people reacted to the article with eagerness. Of these, the most important was Sándor Büchler's article.^ "No doubt," he writes, "the Jewish Museum would be a most welcome institution whose value would lie not only in illustrating the history of Hungarian Jews with the exhibited objects, but chiefly, it would serve the important purpose of awakening a sense ol history in Hungarian Jewry." Büchler continues to relate how so many important valuables of Hungarian Jewry are ruined. Old and rare gravestones are used to build cemetery fences; important documents of congregations land on the