page_title: The Precious Legacy
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: The Precious Legacy / Description
caption_attribution_description: English: Praha - Jewish Museum - Children's drawings from Theresienstadt
context_page_description: 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 Art Gallery in Manchester, U.K., in 1980. It subsequently toured the United States and Canada from 1983 to 1986. In 1990, part of the show was brought to Israel for a joint exhibition with the permanent collection of the Israel Museum. The travelling exhibition was relaunched in 1998 for a two-year tour of Sweden, New Zealand, and Australia.
  Most of the artifacts in the exhibit had been confiscated by Nazi Germany for a planned "Museum to an Extinct Race", but now belong to the Jewish Museum in Prague. The objects, dating from the early 17th to mid-20th centuries, included silverwork, pottery, textiles, paintings, drawings, and ritual and household items. The exhibition was noted for being a mixture of fine art, folk art, and anthropological study; for the irony by which fascists and communists had preserved the merits of the culture; and for showing a continuity of culture across multiple social upheavals.
context_section_description: Three hundred and fifty objects from the State Jewish Museum of Prague collection were included in the exhibit. 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. 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.
  Most of the artifacts were 18th and 19th century, the oldest object being a 1601 parochet (Ark curtain). Together with sterling silver Torah pointers were simple pointers in wood, and ritual pitchers of painted pottery. Display cases in the exhibit showcased silver and gold ritual objects—many, like a Torah crown, styled in emulation of the Imperial Crown of Austria, reflecting the cultural integration of the Jewish community in central Europe. The artifacts represented all aspects of the Jewish year, including Passover Seder plates, matzo rollers, Hanukkah menorahs and dreidels, Havdalah candles, and items used in Jewish wedding and burial ceremonies. Household items such as tablecloths and coffee grinders were also included. According to one of the curators, "The Nazis took spoons and dishes and furniture, and they did it with the same kind of pathological efficiency with which they did everything".
  "Dozens" of historical oil portraits of men, women, and children were also featured. A series of portraits depicts death and mourning rituals in Judaism, including the burial society gathering to recite prayers by the deathbed, washing the body, sewing the shroud, placing the body in the earth, and engaging in the traditional week of mourning. One section of the exhibition was devoted to the Jewish deportees to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Collections from this period include children's artwork, such as a sketch of the interior of the barracks by a nine-year-old inmate.
  It was the first major exhibit of Judaica to be displayed in North American museums. 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. For similar reasons there is little pure art, aside from a few portraits, with most of the objects being functional items made for a specific purpose.  The objects have a familiarity in the universal experiences of birth, work, family life, and death.
  Salem Alaton, writing for The Globe and Mail, described it as a collection of beautiful functional items with a relationship to a living culture, with mixed opinions on whether the show was fine art, folk art, or an anthropological display. He noted the "richness and humanity" of the culture, and its "almost incomprehensible endurance" in a study of how they lived, rather than how they died.
  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.
caption: Children's drawings from the Theresienstadt Ghetto on display at the Jewish Museum of Prague
exif: {"Image Make": "EASTMAN KODAK COMPANY", "Image Model": "KODAK DX6490 ZOOM DIGITAL CAMERA", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "230", "Image YResolution": "230", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2009:05:31 16:16:43", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered", "Image ExifOffset": "406", "GPS GPSVersionID": "[2, 3, 0, 0]", "GPS GPSLatitudeRef": "N", "GPS GPSLatitude": "[50, 5, 1049/50]", "GPS GPSLongitudeRef": "E", "GPS GPSLongitude": "[14, 25, 103/100]", "Image GPSInfo": "792", "Image CustomRendered": "Normal", "Image ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "Image WhiteBalance": "Auto", "Image DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "Image FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "38", "Image SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "Image GainControl": "None", "Image Contrast": "Normal", "Image Saturation": "Normal", "Image Sharpness": "Normal", "Image SubjectDistanceRange": "0", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/45", "EXIF FNumber": "14/5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2003:01:02 01:08:24", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2003:01:02 01:08:24", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "11/2", "EXIF ApertureValue": "3", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "3", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "63/10", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2304", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1728", "EXIF ExposureIndex": "80", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed"}