Introduction

The phenomenon of Jewish museums in post-war Europe has become a subject of academic discourse in recent decades. In the context of European integration, it is worth noting the establishment of the Association of European Jewish Museums immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Association brought together over sixty museums from various countries across the continent, united by a common desire to "...promote an understanding of Jewish culture and to assist in the preservation of Jewish tangible and intangible heritage in Europe." The role of modern Jewish museums is not limited to the educational and didactic purposes that characterized such institutions prior to the Second World War; rather, the development of each is directly linked to the socio-political context of its respective country[1].

The Jewish museum boom erupted in Europe in the mid-1970s, thirty years after the Holocaust. Ruth Gruber, a specialist in traditional Jewish culture, attributes this to an overwhelming sense of guilt felt by European nations toward Jews: "What survived stood out in stark relief, as if viewed through a magnifying lens, highlighting the tragedy of the Holocaust"[2]. Paradoxically, it was precisely the Jewish museums that, to some extent, worked to address this moral dilemma. In this context, two distinct approaches emerged. The first is most accurately defined by museum critic John Corry's observation: "Jews who are no longer there seem to come alive in the museum space,"[3] while the other vector is summarized by Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, chief curator of the Jewish Museum Vienna, as the concept of "memorialization"[4]. In all likelihood, both directions—the "historical-archaeological" and the "memorial"—are explicitly inherent to all contemporary Jewish museums. Implicitly, however, the Jewish museum of any given country also acts as a subject in that country's history. Commenting on the trend of Jewish museums in the Federal Republic of Germany, Inka Bertz, curator of the Jewish Museum Berlin, notes that although "they are dedicated to Jewish history, they also reflect the history of post-war Germany"[5]. Characterizing Jewish museums in the countries of the former Soviet bloc, Ruth Ellen Gruber notes that, despite their diminished role and the absence of synagogues closed by the authorities, they remained the sole locus of Jewish life[6].

The history of the emergence of major Jewish museums in recent decades vividly illustrates their place in socio-political discourse. Their ideology and practice reflect both contemporary European politics—with corresponding views on emigration and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict[7]—and the construction of "metahistory." The "metahistorical approach" in the ideology of the POLIN Museum is highlighted by the prominent Israeli historian Moshe Rosman, who suggests that it is precisely through the prism of the Jewish presence in Poland that the Jewish museum in Warsaw becomes a museum of Polish history at its peak. "The Poland that turns out to be truly 'Polish' is precisely the Poland that... was (perhaps ironically) relatively tolerant, multi-ethnic, and multicultural. In this sense, the museum's objective (at least implicitly) is to reconstruct Poland's long history of cultural and religious diversity"[8].

The Jewish Museum Revival in the Former Soviet Union: Goals and Trends

The historical discourse outlined above leaves aside the phenomenon of the emergence of Jewish museums in the territory of the former Soviet Union[9]. The genesis of this phenomenon is highly important in the context of the historical processes that unfolded in the former Soviet republics that became independent states following the collapse of the USSR. Its foundation reveals two independent vectors: the legalization of previously closed museum and archival collections related to Jewish subjects,[10] and the recreation of formerly closed Jewish museums or the establishment of new ones.

Open access to Jewish collections in museum archives became a natural consequence of the liberalization of the Soviet Union's domestic and foreign policy. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, Western scholars, museum curators, and collectors, who had heard rumors of "Jewish treasures" gathering dust in Soviet museums, gained the opportunity to study them. A pioneer in this field was the Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which as early as 1991 began systematically documenting Jewish monuments and Jewish museum collections in the former USSR.

Concurrently, Judith Belinfante, director of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, established contacts with the Russian Museum of Ethnography in St. Petersburg, which housed one of the most unique Jewish collections in Europe, assembled in the early 20th century during the legendary expeditions of Semyon An-sky[11].

With Belinfante's assistance, Lyudmila Uritskaya, chief curator of the Museum of Ethnography, succeeded in rescuing this collection from obscurity, cataloging it, and exhibiting it in the Netherlands in 1992 under the title "In the Steps of An-sky: Jewish Life in the Russian Empire." Thus, for the first time since the exhibition "Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR"—which opened in 1939 and closed in 1940—objects of Jewish culture were presented to the public, albeit abroad[12]. In addition to the Netherlands, artifacts from the St. Petersburg museum were exhibited with great success between 1992 and 1994 in Cologne, Frankfurt, Jerusalem, and New York[13].

In the early 1990s, a magnificent collection of Jewish folk art, assembled primarily in Galicia by Maximilian Goldstein, was retrieved from the archives of the Lviv Museum of Ethnography and Crafts. Its owner perished in the Lviv Ghetto, having managed to deposit the collection with the city museum. This collection survived thanks to the dedicated efforts of the museum's director, the distinguished Ukrainian art historian Pavlo Zholtovsky, and his student Faina Petriakova[14]. In 1993, researchers from the Center for Jewish Art, in collaboration with Petriakova, documented this collection, and a year later it was exhibited at the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv. Subsequently, due to its ambiguous legal status,[15] the collection was once again sealed away from the public in the vaults of the Lviv museum.

A third world-class collection of Judaica in the USSR was kept in the vaults of the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine in Kyiv and remained unexhibited until Perestroika. This collection, which held the tacit status of a "special archive"[16], was assembled during the Soviet era. Its core consisted of religious items confiscated in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as a collection of ceremonial Judaica from the Jewish Museum of Odesa, which had been closed and disbanded prior to the Second World War, transferred to Kyiv in 1952[17].

Since conditions in the storage vaults were far from ideal, preparing the collection for display required extensive restoration work. The first exhibition of these "Jewish treasures" took place not in Kyiv, but in the Finnish city of Turku in 1991, followed by a showing in Vienna in 1993.

The collection officially joined the permanent exhibition of the museum in 1994 (with approximately 60 out of 400 items on display); however, in 1997 it was sent to Luxembourg, a year later to Canavese (Italy), after which it finally became a permanent fixture of the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine[18].

In each of these cases, a Jewish collection capable—both in volume and quality—of forming an independent Jewish museum was presented to the public at the initiative and with the support of Western partners. Characteristically, the old "museum guard," who had kept Jewish artifacts under lock and key during the Soviet era, quickly adapted to the new market reality. Jewish museum collections attracted international sponsors, promised long-term research trips abroad, and elevated the international profile of domestic institutions. The "export" exhibition process initially occurred separate from internal museum activities and was known to local specialists primarily through catalogs published abroad. However, it was precisely due to international demand that Jewish heritage gained legitimacy in the eyes of the former Soviet museum establishment, and over time, Jewish artifacts were integrated into local exhibitions. Thus, the "Jewish treasures" of the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine took their place alongside Scythian gold and Eastern Orthodox liturgical objects, forming a unified exhibition entitled "Art in Ukraine."

A different historical and cultural paradigm drove the emergence of Jewish museums in Vilnius, Tbilisi, and Riga. The opening of the State Jewish Museum in Vilnius in 1989[19] carried a highly declarative significance. On the one hand, it was a symbolic gesture of Lithuania's pursuit of independence (which the republic achieved a year later); on the other hand, it represented a chain of historical continuity originating with the Jewish museum opened in 1913 and reconstituted after the First World War in 1919. This museum, revived in 1944 by a handful of Jewish intellectuals from Vilnius who had survived the Holocaust, was shut down by the Soviet authorities in 1949 in what then appeared to be a permanent closure. This dual continuity with both the pre-war and post-war museums essentially led to the formation of two distinct institutions. One museum presented the traditional culture of Lithuanian Jewry, while the other focused on the tragedy of the community during the Second World War. Thus, the opening of the museum in Vilnius served as a manifestation of both Lithuania's independence and the distinct identity of Lithuanian Jews.

A similar cultural paradigm was realized in Georgia, where a Jewish museum operated from 1934 to 1951. Following its closure, its collections were transferred to the National Museum of Georgia and the National Center of Manuscripts. In 1988, the Georgian Academy of Sciences established the Association for Georgian-Jewish Relations, which, with state support, opened a Jewish Museum in 1992 in the very same "Round Synagogue" building that had housed the old museum. All Jewish exhibits from state collections were returned to the Jewish Museum. Its creation clearly reflected Georgia's independent course during the collapse of the USSR, the unique ethnicity of Georgian Jews, and their centuries-old integration into the local culture[20].

The museum in Riga, unlike those in Vilnius and Tbilisi, was established as a community initiative by former ghetto and concentration camp prisoners. The "Jews in Latvia" Museum opened in 1989 in the heart of the capital, in the historic building of the Riga Jewish Community dating back to the early 20th century. The return of this architectural monument to its Jewish owners by the municipal authorities was highly symbolic. The museum was primarily envisioned as a place of memory for the victims of the Holocaust on Latvian territory and as a Shoah documentation center. To a large extent, its creation was a reaction to decades of state silence regarding the Holocaust of Latvian Jews, the participation of local collaborators in "actions," and the neglect of mass execution sites. In 1996, the Holocaust exhibition was expanded with displays detailing the history of Latvian Jews—a segment of the exhibition space that continues to expand to this day.

The opening of Jewish museums in Vilnius, Tbilisi, and Riga served as a harbinger of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, resulting from the major political shifts of the late 20th century.

Jewish "Museum Politics" in Russia

A completely different socio-political atmosphere accompanied the opening of Jewish museums in the late 1990s and early 2000s. During those years, Jewish museums became an integral part of museum development in Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states, reflecting a broader reexamination and construction of new ideologies and national histories in these nations.

In Russia, the establishment of Jewish museums was initiated by three distinct social groups. The first aligned with state structures implementing a "Jewish museum" project by directive "from above." At the state level, the creation of Jewish museums reflected an era of liberalization and Russia's active integration into the European and global communities. Wide publicity was given to Russian President Vladimir Putin's promise to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to restore old Jewish museums and open new ones in major cities, in line with other European capitals. In St. Petersburg, plans were made to restore the old Jewish museum on Vasilievsky Island, whose primary collection was held in the Russian Museum of Ethnography (REM). Having completed an international tour, these Jewish artifacts began appearing in exhibitions, the largest of which was tellingly titled "The Culture of One People." However, this top-down initiative ultimately culminated in 2008 not in the restoration of the Jewish Museum, but in the creation of a permanent exhibition within the halls of the REM, from which other "minority peoples" were displaced.

The "Museum within a Museum," as this exhibition of unique objects of traditional Jewish culture was called, became one of the most stagnant Jewish museum projects. Following the departure of specialized staff, it turned into a rather dry and uninspired display, overshadowed by other sections of the museum. At the same time, a truly outstanding outcome of the work with the museum's Jewish collections was the catalog produced by Lyudmila Uritskaya and Shimon Iakerson[21].

Another social group involved in this process consisted of Jewish public organizations and religious communities. In the late 1990s, two of the largest Jewish organizations—the Russian Jewish Congress and the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FEOR)—began competing to establish a Jewish museum. This rivalry resulted in two separate museums, each integrating into Russia's cultural and political life in its own way.

In 1998, the Russian Jewish Congress opened the Museum of Jewish Heritage and Holocaust as part of the state memorial complex on Poklonnaya Gora, dedicated to the peoples of the Soviet Union who defeated Nazism. Under the new state policy, these peoples were represented by three official religions: Orthodoxy, Islam, and Judaism, meaning the core of the complex comprised a church, a mosque, and a synagogue. The theme of the memorial determined the focus of the exhibition inside the memorial synagogue: the Holocaust and Jewish heroism during the Second World War.

The FEOR project, supported by the Russian government, was considerably more ambitious and larger in scale. The concept for the museum was formulated by FEOR leaders in the late 1990s, but its development took over a decade, progressing in parallel with the POLIN Museum in Warsaw, which introduced an element of competition. The mission of this new institution, named the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center (JMTC), was defined as "creating a creative and interactive platform for intercultural dialogue." Opened in 2012, the JMTC's concept and exhibition were developed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates with the participation of leading Jewish historians, following a process similar to the creation of the Warsaw POLIN Museum. Despite the challenges of reconciling the macro- and microcosm of Jewish civilization within a single exhibition, the Moscow museum became a prime example of a new type of museum responsive to contemporary challenges. Utilizing advanced museum technology and remaining sensitive to public demand, it established itself as one of the most attractive venues on the capital's cultural map, catering primarily to an educated youth audience. For the first time, Russia had a Jewish museum capable of competing with the largest national museums and exhibition centers in the capital.

Among other initiatives by Jewish public organizations, the Museum of Mountain Jews, which is set to open soon, deserves mention. It was funded by prominent businessmen and philanthropists originating from Qırmızı Qəsəbə (Krasnaya Sloboda), and appears to be their most prestigious project. The museum is housed in one of the historic synagogues of Krasnaya Sloboda, "Karu," which was specifically reconstructed for the future exhibition. An obvious challenge is the geographic isolation of Krasnaya Sloboda (located in northern Azerbaijan) and the small size of the local Jewish population (approximately 500 Mountain Jews out of 8,000 residents), which features almost no youth.

The third initiative group involved in establishing Jewish museums in Russia consisted of independent researchers. By the late 1990s, they had formed their own institutions, supported by donor organizations and private individuals. In early 2000, a group of St. Petersburg researchers founded the "Petersburg Judaica" Research and Educational Center. In the preface to the volume of articles "The Jewish Museum"[22], published by the center in 2004, their position was articulated as follows: "A Jewish museum is an indispensable attribute of the cultural life of great cities: Prague, Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Berlin. The absence of a Jewish museum in St. Petersburg—one of the museum capitals of the world—is all the more regrettable given that the city once housed one of the first and finest Jewish museums in Europe: the Museum of the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Society (1916–1929)."

To fill this gap, the Center for the Study of Jewish Cultural Monuments and the Creation of a Jewish Museum was established in early 2000. Its work resulted in the assembly of its own art and ethnographic collection, alongside exhibitions dedicated to lost monuments, forgotten pages of Jewish history, Jewish artists, and other subjects. "Petersburg Judaica" implements its exhibition projects in partnership with state museums that hold Jewish artifacts but lack the academic expertise to prepare such exhibitions independently.

This collaborative approach was pursued with the REM prior to the creation of the "Museum within a Museum," and continues today in partnership with the Museum of the History of Religion, which houses a rich and largely unknown collection of Jewish ceremonial objects. Another important museum project of the Center has been its publishing activity, particularly the catalogs of six exhibitions of Yudovin's photographs, taken during the An-sky expedition, from the holdings of "Petersburg Judaica." In this regard, we must highlight the pioneering work of Alexander Kantsedikas, who, along with photographer Sergey Tartakovsky, began identifying Jewish collections in state museums in the late 1980s and subsequently compiled and published seven catalog volumes titled "Masterpieces of Jewish Art," published by Image between 1992 and 2001.

In 2011, the Museum of the History of Jews in Russia opened in Moscow, establishing itself as the only private Jewish museum in the Russian Federation. Its founder and director is the writer, businessman, and public figure Sergey Ustinov[23]. The creators of the museum aimed to reflect both the traditional way of life and the integration into society of various Jewish ethnic groups (Ashkenazi, Bukharan, Mountain, and Georgian Jews) residing within the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. This objective was shaped by years of field research and an awareness of the risk of an expanding historical gap separating traditional and modern Jewry. The museum's founders seized what was perhaps the last opportunity to salvage the surviving material traces of Jewish civilization in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The last Jewish homes in the shtetls of Podolia, where Jews no longer lived, were disappearing; the last residents of the Jewish mahalla in Bukhara or Samarkand were leaving their homes, leaving centuries of household items to vanish. The Museum's expeditions managed to gather and preserve these final remnants of Jewish life. Consequently, the Museum of the History of Jews in Russia has become the only museum in Europe where artifacts of traditional Jewish diaspora life are represented in both the permanent exhibition and temporary displays[24].

Jewish Museums and the Construction of Local Jewish Identity

While not always independent museums, dedicated "Jewish exhibitions" within state museums have also emerged in several CIS countries. Worthy of mention here is an important collection that once constituted the independent Native Jewish Museum, dedicated to Bukharan Jews and established by Isaac Lurie in the late 1920s in Samarkand. Lurie was repressed and perished in the Stalinist camps, and the museum's collections were transferred to the Samarkand State Museum-Reserve. In 2008, an exhibition based on this collection was opened at the Samarkand Regional Museum of Local Lore[25].

In Ukraine, Jewish exhibitions (conceived as part of the country's artistic heritage) are housed in state institutions, including the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine in Kyiv and the Lviv Historical Museum.

The creation of new Jewish museums in Ukraine remains the domain of Jewish public organizations and communities. The largest of these is the "Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine" Museum, which opened at the Jewish Community Center in Dnipro in 2012. The primary mission of the museum, as reflected in its name, is to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust. To a large extent, it reflects the current situation in Ukraine, integrating and contrasting the dramatic events of 20th-century Ukrainian history within its exhibition. This approach is characteristic of almost all Jewish museums in the post-Soviet space.

In 2012, a meeting of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress was held in Kyiv to discuss the concept of creating a network of "sub-ethnic Jewish museums" across various regions of the CIS (primarily in Ukraine). The project aimed to demonstrate the phenomenon of "the existence of distinct local sub-ethnic groups within Eurasia: Bukovinian, Galician, Moldovan Jewry, etc. It was intended to capture the unique character of Jewish life in the region against the backdrop of the complex developmental processes of the local Jewish community under specific historical conditions"[26]. The main obstacle to realizing such a project, in my view, lies in the absence of the subject itself—representative groups of these "Jewish sub-ethnicities" and, consequently, their specific material culture. At the same time, Jewish museums established by community organizations face real historical challenges. For instance, the website of the Museum of the History of Odessa Jews states: "The necessity of establishing such a museum stems from the fact that the history of Odessa's Jews is virtually unrepresented in the exhibitions of Odessa's state museums." This paradoxical situation is not an isolated case but rather a systemic feature of museum practice in Ukraine, as well as in Belarus and Moldova.

In 2017, the author visited the local history museum in the Moldovan town of Edineț, where Jews made up 72% of the population before the Second World War. The museum itself is housed in the residence of a Jewish industrialist, yet there is no mention of the town's Jewish population or the home's former owner. Thus, local Jewish museums face a different task—one related not to local identity, but to the challenges of constructing a new historical narrative in which the "genocide of the native population" holds a dominant position, paradoxically serving to maintain a "balance of genocides." Often, within this narrative, Jews are either absent or viewed through the prism of old or new stereotypes, whereby the crimes of the Soviet regime (including the participation of the local population in state repressions) are shifted onto Jews. There is also another "uncomfortable" topic for exhibition: the active participation of Jews in the economic and cultural life of the town or region, as this inevitably raises the sensitive question of where the Jewish population went.

Another challenge faced by Jewish museums in Ukraine and the Baltic states relates to the highly controversial figures of the struggle for independence who have become part of a new heroic myth. The contradictions in the biographies of these individuals, including their complicity in the Holocaust, are either obscured, denied, or excused as a "natural" reaction to the "Jewish role in repressions against the local population"—an argument that aligns closely with wartime Nazi propaganda. This virtually insurmountable issue is discussed in detail by Dovid Katz[27] using the example of the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius, the most visited museum in Lithuania, where not only controversial figures but entire collaborationist organizations occupy a central place in the national myth of the struggle for freedom. This challenge currently has no resolution, as it operates within two contradictory spheres: mythology and documented history.

Understandably, small Jewish museums—even those rich in content, such as the Museum of Bukovinian Jews, supported by the Vaad of Ukraine, or the Museum of Odessa Jews (which has no connection to the pre-war Jewish Museum)—cannot adequately represent the scale of the Jewish contribution to the region or city, let alone counter state museums and new historical concepts. Addressing this issue requires not only entirely different material and human resources, but also an active dialogue with local historical museums. (A unique example of this is the cooperation between the Museum of Mountain Jews in Derbent, established in 2010 on the initiative of Irina Mikhailova, and the Museum of the History of Derbent, where the Jewish presence in the city is represented alongside other local ethnic groups).

***

In summarizing more than thirty years of Jewish museum development in the former Soviet Union, it can be argued that Jewish museums, by reflecting the complexities of both macro- and micro-history, continue to shape not only global and local history, but Jewish history itself.

It is in this multi-faceted function that we see the relevant role of modern Jewish museums today.

Comprehensive support for local Jewish museums is, in my view, a task no less important than supporting communal and religious life; only the reconstruction of historical truth can foster the psychological environment in which Jewish communities can continue to exist.

1 |  Richard I. Cohen, Ed. Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History: Studies in Contemporary Jewry. An Annual XXVI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See also Natalia Berger, The Jewish Museum: History and Memory, Identity and Art from Vienna to the Bezalel National Museum, Jerusalem (Leiden: Brill, 2017)

2 |  Ruth Ellen Gruber, “Post-trauma ‘Precious Legacies’: Jewish Museums in Eastern Europe after the Holocaust and before the Fall of Communism”, in Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History, p. 114

3 |  John Corry, “The Precious Legacy of Czech Jews”, New York Times, May 7, 1986. Ruth Ellen Gruber clearly demonstrates this approach in the aforementioned article, “Post-trauma ‘Precious Legacies’”, p. 114

4 |  Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek, “Thoughts on the Role of European Jewish Museum in the 21 st. Century”, in Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History, p. 256

5 |  Inka Bertz, “Jewish Museums in the Federal Republic of Germany”, in Visualizing and Exhibiting Jewish Space and History: Studies in Contemporary Jewry. An Annual XXVI (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 80-81

6 |  Ruth Ellen Gruber, “Posttrauma”, p. 127

7 |  See Heimann-Jelinek, “Thoughts on the Role of European Jewish Museum in the 21 st. Century”, where the subject of Turkish immigration in the Jewish museums of Vienna and Frankfurt is addressed.  For events connected with the Berlin museum, see Benjamin Wienthal, “‘Anti-Jewish’ Museum in Berlin under fire for supporting BDS”, Jerusalem Post, 9 June 2019

8 |  Quoted from the Russian translation of Moshe Rosman's book, How Jewish is Jewish History, Mosty Kultury/ Gesharim, 2014, p. 236

9 |  See the review by Maria Kaspina, “Jewish Museums in the Former USSR and the World: Goals and Meaning”, EAJ Policy papers, No 24 (August 2019) where she addresses the topic declared in her article's title.

10 | see "Pectoral Under a Microscope" in Zerkalo Nedeli, Ukraine. Issue 34. 27.8-3.9, 1999 https://zn.ua/SOCIUM/pektoral_pod_mikroskopom.html

11 |  For the history of this collection, see the articles: Igor Krupnik, “The Jewish Holdings in the Leningrad Ethnographical Museum”, in Tracing of An-sky, Jewish Collection from the State Ethnographical Museum in St, Petersburg. Ed. Mariella Beikers&Renee (Waale: Waanders Printers, Zwolle, 1992);  Lukin V., “...An Academy where folklore will be studied” (An-sky — the ideologue of Jewish museum practice) in The Jewish Museum: Collected Articles, compiled by Dymshits V., Kelner V., Symposium, St. Petersburg, 2004); Sergeeva I., “The History of the Museum and Archive of the Jewish Historical and Ethnographical Society after October 1917” in Judaic-Slavic Journal, No. 1 (2) 2019, pp. 13-44

12 |  Ivanov A., “‘Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR’ — an exhibition of the achievements of Jewish economic and cultural construction in the Soviet land”, NLO, No. 2, 2010 https://magazines.gorky.media/nlo/2010/2/evrei-v-czarskoj-rossii-i-v-sssr-vystavka-dostizhenij-evrejskogo-hozyajstvennogo-i-kulturnogo-stroitelstva-v-strane-sovetov.html

13 |  See the Catalog Tracing of An-sky, Jewish Collection from the State Ethnographical Museum in St, Petersburg, ed. Mariella Beikers&Renee Waale, Waanders Printers, Zwolle, 1992

14 |  Some objects from this collection were published without mentioning it in a pioneering article by Zholtovsky P., “Monuments of Jewish Art.” Dekorativnoe Iskusstvo SSSR, 1966. No. 9; and also by Kantsedikas A., in the series “Jewish Art: Copper and Silver”

15 |  See Treasures of Jewish Galicia: Judaica from the Museum of Ethnography and Crafts in Lvov, Ukraine, Ed. Sarah Harel Hoshen, Tel Aviv, 1994

16 |  See note 10

17 |  See Romanovskaya T., “Top Secret... The History of the Judaica Collection of the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine”, Institute of Jewish Studies: Proceedings of the XII International Scientific Conference 'Jewish History and Culture in the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe — Jewish Local History and Collecting'; Kotlyar E., “The Creative Heritage of Usher Chiter and Elyukim Maltz in the Context of the Development of Jewish Ethnography and Museum Practice in the Interwar Period”, Judaic-Slavic Journal No. 1 (2), 2019, pp. 80-119

18 |  Arte in Ucraina: Collezione del Museo d’Arte Russa di Kiev, Milano, 1998

19 |  The initiative to restore the Jewish Museum in Vilnius belonged to Emanuelis Zingeris, a prominent figure in the Sajudis movement who advocated for Lithuania's independence and later became the director of the Jewish Museum and a member of the Lithuanian parliament.

20 |  Leila Tsitsuashvili, Cultural Heritage of Georgian Jews, Georgian National Museum, 2013

21 |  Uritskaya L., Iakerson S., Jewish Treasures of St. Petersburg: Ashkenazi Collections of the Russian Museum of Ethnography. St. Petersburg: “Arka”, 2009

22 |  The Jewish Museum. Collected Articles, compiled by Dymshits V., Kelner V., (St. Petersburg, Symposium, 2004)

23 |  The initiator of this project along with Sergey Ustinov was the museum's first director, Leonid Liflyand.

24 |  See Museum of the History of Jews in Russia. Album, Vol. 1, Vol. 2, eds. Kazovsky G., Kaspina M.,  Chaimovich B. — Moscow, 2015

25 |  For the history of the Native Jewish Museum, see the online article by Nosonovsky M., “Isaac Lurie and the Jewish Museum in Samarkand”, https://berkovich-zametki.com/Nomer13/MN27.htm

26 |  Community report “Activities of the Vaad of Ukraine in 2012”, http://vaadua.org/news/obshchinnyy-otchet-deyatelnost-vaada-ukrainy-v-2012-godu

27 |  Katz D., “The Lithuanian Holocaust Denial Museum”, Lekhaim, May 14, 2018, https://lechaim.ru/events/litovskij-muzej-otritsaniya-holokosta/