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Concept
Jewish Museum of Switzerland
Summary
The Jewish Museum of Switzerland in Basel provides an overview of the religious and everyday history of the Jews in Basel and Switzerland using objects of ritual, art and everyday culture from the Middle Ages to the present.
The museum opened in 1966 as the first Jewish museum in German-speaking Europe after the Second World War. The initiative came from members of Espérance (a chevra kadisha) who visited Cologne to see the exhibition "Monumenta Judaica" in 1963/64. They discovered that many of the ritual objects on display came from the Basel Judaica collection and decided to present these objects permanently in a Jewish museum in Basel.
When it first opened, the museum occupied two rooms at Kornhausgasse 8. The interior designer Christoph Bernoulli furnished the space in an "objective" style. The founding director, Dr. Katia Guth-Dreyfus, headed the museum for four decades. In 2010 she was succeeded by Dr. Gaby Knoch-Mund. In 2015, Dr. Naomi Lubrich took over as director of the Jewish Museum of Switzerland.
Since 2016, Lubrich has re-organized the permanent exhibit, attracted new visitors and gained the museum media attention.
The first objects shown in the Jewish Museum's exhibition were Judaica collected by the Swiss Museum of Folklore (now Museum der Kulturen Basel). The museum's collection expanded after 1966 to include objects from Basel and the Upper Rhine, from the two Surbtal villages Endingen and Lengnau as well as from the remainder of Switzerland and Europe. A noteworthy find, when it comes to the Surbtal valley, are the "Lengnau Mappot", a collection of 218 Torah binders that span almost three centuries, making them the largest cohesive collection of mappot from a known community.
Highlights of the museum's collection include silver ceremonial objects, richly embroidered textiles from the 17th to the 20th centuries and documents from the cultural history of the Jews in Switzerland. The monumental medieval gravestones and the Basel Hebrew prints are important historical testimonies.
Official source
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