The Prague Jewish Museum was founded in 1906, which makes it the third oldest Jewish museum in Central Europe (Vienna 1895, Frankfurt 1897). Its founding was prompted by the city's extensive reconstruction of the Jewish Town of Prague and by an endeavor to preserve the rich investor of Judaic artifact from the Zigeuner and the Great Court Synagogues, which were demolished in May 1906.The founding of the Museum was mainly the work of the historian Dr. Salomon Hugo Lieben (1881 - 1942) who had just graduated from the University of Prague and published his first studies on the history of Prague Jews. He was greatly assisted by Dr. August Stein (1854 - 1937), a representative of the Bohemian Jewish movement and later head of the Prague Jewish Community.The Statutes of the Association for the Founding and Maintenance of the Jewish Museum in Prague were approved on August 29, 1906. The objective of the association was to collect, preserve and exhibit ritual items of household and synagogue worship as well as archive materials, manuscripts and old printed books depicting Jewish history and illustrations of Jewish monuments and personalities. As Lieben recognized, the main historical significance of the Museum was that its collections were to be based solely on items from Bohemia and Moravia.In the autumn of 1941 Prague`s synagogues were closed and converted into warehouses for confiscated Jewish property. Jewish communities soon started to be evacuated as a result of deportations to concentration camps. Dr. Karel Stein (1906 - 1961), the head of the administration of the provincial communities, quickly tried to find a way of saving Judaic artifacts. At the beginning of 1942 he developed a proposal for the establishment of a central museum, where would be concentrated collections from the Jewish Museums of Prague and Mikulov, cult objects from Prague Synagogues and other artifacts from the pre-war Jewish communities in Bohemia and Moravia. After protracted negotiations the Nazi authorities finally approved the project, albeit guided by completely different intentions.
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