Acquisitions in 2017

In addition to the Taslitzky donation, Yolande Lévy also donated a portrait, Jewish Student, painted in 1927 by Mané-Katz (1894-1962). The museum’s collections were also enhanced by a 19th-century majolica Seder dish (the ritual feast marking the beginning of Passover) donated by Céline Kichelewski, 20th-century Tunisian amulets donated by Lucette Valensi and Abraham Udovitch, Italian, Tunisian and Ottoman crockery and jewellery donated by Giuliana Moreno, early 20th-century European and North African objects and garments donated by Charles Dahan, Gilbert Touati, Mario Bensasson and Gilberte Kalfon, a prayer shawl bag belonging to the late André Bensimon (dated 1924) donated by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a Torah case (tiq) from Ghardaïa donated by the Chekroun-Setti family, 19th-century religious objects from a family oratory donated by Gérard Racowski, a copy of La Vie juive by Léon Cahun (1841-1900) illustrated by Alphonse Lévy (1843-1918) donated by Edgardo Cozarinsky, and a Daguerreotype portrait of Dina “Joséphine” Liebschutz (1831-1867) donated by Olivier Meyer. Finally, Isabelle and Olivier Audebert offered the museum a very rare late 13th-century or early 14th-century funerary stela from the medieval Jewish cemetery in Bourges. In excellent condition, it bears priceless testimony to the Jewish presence in France before the expulsions in the Middle Ages.  

Purchases included an early 20th-century case and phylacteries (tefillin), a study on card dating from the late 1940s of the Kigmy, the emblematic Jewish scapegoat figure, by the famous New York cartoonist Al Capp (1909-1979).

The mahJ also successfully pre-empted an original edition of The Golem by Gustav Meyrink (1915) illustrated by Hugo Steiner-Prag (1880-1945), an edition of Haggadah for Passover by Ben Shahn (1898-1969), gouaches and drawings by Alphonse Lévy (1826-1890), Édouard Loevy (1857-1911) and Jules Worms (1832-1924), two more drawings by Alphonse Lévy and the portrait of Isidore Mendel by Émile Lévy (1826-1890), an early 19th-century earthenware plate with the inscription bassar (“meat”), a marriage contract (ketubah) drawn up in Nîmes in 1856, documents concerning the Emancipation and the Dreyfus Affair, photographs by Walter Zadek (1900-1992) of the life of the pioneers in Palestine in the 1930s, and a rare print by Charles Philibert de Lasteyrie (1759-1849), Interior View of a Synagogue.