The Precious Legacy
The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collections was one of the names for a travelling exhibition of Czech Jewish art and ritual objects that opened at The Whitworth in Manchester, in 1980.
[1] During its U.S. tour, the exhibit drew more than 550,000 visitors, with a record-breaking attendance of over 110,000 in its seven-week run at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.
The Nazis prioritised the museums' functions as the collection and storage of "numerous, hitherto scattered Jewish possessions of both historical and artistic value, on the territory of the entire Protectorate".
[5] Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi official in charge of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (with its capital at Prague), sought to preserve and exhibit the material as decadent,[8] barbaric, and depraved, to advance the theory that the Jews were an inferior race which had to be exterminated.
[6][11][dubious – discuss] The museum's Jewish curators were set to work cataloguing between 140,000 and 150,000 artifacts,[6][12] ranging from wedding portraits and infant cradles to Torah scrolls and hand-embroidered synagogue fabrics.
The materials had been seized by the fascist regime from the 77,297 Moravian and Bohemian Jews who had been sent to death camps—in the words of art critic Jo Ann Lewis, "a donor list without precedent in the history of mankind".
Congressman Charles Vanik, a descendant of Czech Catholic immigrants, and his Jewish aide Mark E. Talisman visited Prague on a mission of East–West understanding during the Cold War.
[14] Whitworth director Charles Reginald Dodwell had spent eight years to negotiate an exchange of exhibitions, and considered it his career highlight.
[10] Talisman recruited art historian Anna Cohn from the National Jewish Museum (B'nai B'rith Klutznick) in 1982; she joined the Smithsonian curatorial team[3] and became the project director for the North American tour.
"[27] Feeling that it met "all the criteria of a worthwhile exhibition",[27] he initiated the idea for a Canadian tour,[5] and in summer 1984 was named the official negotiator on behalf of the National Museums of Canada.
[28] The artifacts were displayed alongside photo-murals of Nazi storage rooms crammed with violins, books, pianos, household furnishings, and other items confiscated from their doomed owners.
[6] The exhibit was divided into five themed sections, each separated by an arched stone gateway, simulating the streets of the old Jewish Quarter of Prague.
Altshuler stated that this was rooted in theology, specifically the Second Commandment's directive against making graven images and whether items of communion could leave the synagogue.
[3] Nancy Baele of The Ottawa Citizen wrote that the objects give a sense of stability and continuity, despite the many upheavals in the community's thousand-year history.
She felt that the final exhibition area, "The Legacy of Tragedy and Transcendence" which addresses the Holocaust, showed a sense of unprecedented horror.
However, she felt that the religious items and children's drawings secretly made at Thereseindstadt to be the most moving, testifying to a continuity of culture under unimaginable circumstances.
[6] Jack Granek of The Toronto Star found the catalogue to be "lavishly illustrated" with essays of "illuminating scholarship, linking religion, Judaica and history".
[35] However, John Bentley Mays of The Globe and Mail felt it "should never have been published" in its current state, lacking information on iconography, stylistic features, and the interest in gathering and preserving the collection by dissimilar organizations.
[38] A 1985 curatorial report by the Detroit Institute of the Arts called The Precious Legacy "the major exhibition of the year" and noted that it and "a full program of related educational activities, lectures, concerts, and films" were well received.
[40] After its U.S. tour concluded, the exhibit traveled to Canada, where it appeared in Toronto, Calgary, and Montreal before returning to the State Jewish Museum in Prague.
[29] The Canadian tour began with a highly publicized opening at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, with every key person who helped launch The Precious Legacy flown in for a press conference.
[43] The ROM shows coincided with the 40th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust,[7] and also with the high holidays of the Jewish New Year, beginning on September 15 with Rosh Hashana, a time for reflection and reaffirming faith.
[56] While the North American installations provided a message on the durability of Jewish life, this is already self-evident in Israel where the exhibition ended with death at Terezín.
[62] The exhibition had the same five-section layout as the earlier North American tour, with themes of Jewish holidays, family life, education, burial societies, and the work of those at Terezín.
[63] The tour opened at the Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde museum in Stockholm, Sweden,[61] under the name Det judiska Prag[64] (English: Jewish Prague[60]).
[64] The Project Judaica Foundation helped bring the exhibition to New Zealand,[65] where it was shown at the Auckland War Memorial Museum from July 31 to October 26, 1998.
[61][72] The U.S. tour, held while Prague was behind the Iron Curtain, made people in the West aware of the Jewish art and buildings that had survived the Nazi and Communist regimes.
[3] By 1986, Sylvie Wittmann, lay leader of Bejt Simcha, a Progressive Jewish congregation in Prague, was leading tours of Josefov and the nearby Theresienstadt Ghetto.
[73][74][75] The Precious Legacy was also the title of a 1986 American television documentary depicting the Judaica artifacts stored in Prague and the city's modern-day Jewish community.
