Jewish Museum of Rio de J

The Jewish Museum of Rio de Janeiro, founded in 1977, with the donation of a menorah, is a cultural center whose activities are structured around the binomial preservation of the memory / dynamization of the Jewish culture. It maintains permanent exhibitions on the history of the Jewish community in Rio de Janeiro and the traditions of Judaism in all its aspects - religious, cultural and historical - and holds exhibitions at its headquarters and other institutions, as well as promoting academic research on immigration and annual competitions for students. It also has a Nucleus of Studies, with research on immigration and Holocaust, a video library with more than a thousand titles and a thematic library.

History

The Jewish Museum of Rio de Janeiro emerged in 1977 from the need for the Jewish community of Rio de Janeiro to rescue and preserve its history and its memory - which are intertwined with Jewish memory and traditions. Formed from the first decade of the twentieth century mainly by immigrants from Eastern Europe, the community changed with successive migratory waves, which left their mark on objects, documents, books and photos representing an ancestral culture, source of inspiration and knowledge which subsequent generations are striving to preserve.

With the support of other activists, the three founding couples of the Museum - Naum and Ester Kosovsky, George and Bella Jozef and Chaim and Rosa Szwertszarf - engaged in the work and later verified the means, according to their ancestors' promise: "To do for later listening ". The Museum was provisionally installed at the Klepfisz Library in Copacabana, and then transferred to the Rosa Waisman Children's Home in Tijuca, where it remained for three years. It is since 1986 in the current headquarters to the street Mexico 90, 1º. (IDF) and the Israeli Confederation of Brazil (CONIB).

The first piece of the collection was a menorah (seven-branched chandelier, one of the symbols of Judaism), replica of an 18th-century Italian menorah, acquired from the craftsman Joseph Feldman. Born in Russia in 1899, Feldman lived in Rio de Janeiro from 1925 until his death in 1978. He was a photographer, garimpeiro, antiquarian and craftsman. In order for each Jewish home to have a hanukkah (eight-branched chandelier, object of the Jewish ritual used at the time of Hanukkah), it began to reproduce hanukiot. The set of 69 hanukiot exhibited at the Jewish Museum, constituting the Feldman Collection, was donated by the couple Yvone and Leon Herzog.

The Jewish Museum is also a place of preservation of the memory of the Holocaust and homage to the survivors, many of them living in Rio today. In addition to the permanent exhibition of objects, photos and traces of the tragedy (including a concentration camp uniform and a David yellow, a symbol that European Jews were forced to wear on clothing during Nazism). The Museum has a library with more than 300 titles on the theme and holds periodic shows and lectures on the events.

Source: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museu_Judaico_do_Rio_de_Janeiro