We’d like to invite you to join the award-winning author Matti Friedman as he takes us on a rare tour of Jewish history and culture as they appear in the treasures of the great Russian museums.
The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg
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Welcome Welcome to one of the world’s great museums: the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. The museum collection began with Queen Catherine the Great in 1764, and it’s been open to the public for the last 170 years. For people outside Russia, it isn’t easy to get here. But even if you can, the vast majority of the museum’s three million artifacts are off-limits, known mainly to scholars. And the Jewish treasures of the museum have never been widely known. We’d like to invite you to join us for a rare tour, and for a unique glimpse of Jewish history and culture as they appear in the treasures of the Hermitage. |
The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow
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Welcome to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. Opened in 1912 and named for Tsar Alexander III, the museum’s tumultuous history traces that of Russia in the last century. After the Revolution, Soviet authorities renamed the museum for a different Alexander – Pushkin, the writer, playwright, and literary hero. The museum’s 700,000 objects give us a singular portrait of cultures from around the world, as seen by the generations of Russian curators who assembled the collection. One of those cultures is that of the Jews, and this is the focus of our visit. But we won’t be looking at Jewish culture in Russia. Instead we’ll be looking at the museum’s collection from Egypt, and from an era when Jews lived and thrived there – although they weren’t supposed to be there at all. |
The State Museum of the History of Religion in St. Petersburg
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Welcome to the State Museum of the History of Religion in St. Petersburg, Russia. This museum was originally founded in 1932 under Communism, when religion was meant to be a thing of the past. But now that Soviet Communism is a thing of the past, the museum celebrates different religious traditions, housing artifacts from many times and cultures – including that of the Jews. The collection at this museum can teach us about the Jewish religion. But some of the items go farther, telling the story of specific people who are long vanished and forgotten – but who left us an unexpected trace in the form of an artifact. If we can decode what the object is trying to tell us, we’ll learn something about these people and their lives long ago. |
Coming in February 2024!