Collecting Images [04]
From Bavaria to Eretz Israel – Tracing Jewish Folk Art

“From Bavaria to Eretz Israel – Tracing Jewish Folk Art” looks at the preoccupation with testimonies to Jewish culture in the pre-Nazi era.

In the 1920s, the art historian Theodor Harburger (1887–1949) created a comprehensive photographic archive of Jewish ritual objects in Bavaria. From 1926 to 1932, Harburger visited 125 Jewish communities, and looked at numerous private and public collections. The result is an inventory of Jewish folk art comprising some 800 photographs – a testimonial to Jewish culture in Bavaria that is still unique to this day. Harburger was accompanied by his friend, the dentist Heinrich Feuchtwanger, who was also a passionate collector of Judaica himself and who was able to expand his own collection on these trips. Both Harburger and Feuchtwanger committed themselves – ultimately to no avail – to establishing a Jewish museum in Munich. After the seizure of power by the Nazis the two natives of Munich emigrated to Eretz Israel. While many of the synagogues documented by Harburger were destroyed and their ritual objects disappeared, the Feuchtwanger Collection, now in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, remained intact. Selected objects from the collection of the Israel Museum and the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem can now be seen in Munich once again for the first time.