Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives

The Hungarian Jewish Museum is a thematic museum operating in a museum wing built next to the building of the Dohány Street Synagogue, which presents the material remnants of Jewish culture and history in Hungary. It is one of Central Europe's most valuable Judaica collections, owned and managed by MAZSIHISZ.

History

In Hungary, Jewish ritual objects were first publicly displayed in 1884 at the Hungarian Historical Crafts Exhibition held in the building of the Hungarian National Museum. At the 1896 millennial celebrations, at the Millennium National Exhibition, the Hungarian Jewish community was represented with ninety objects.

The official founding of the Hungarian Jewish Museum took place on December 1, 1909, when the Israelite Hungarian Literary Society made a decision on this and began collecting. The first public exhibition was opened on January 23, 1916, in a rented apartment in the house at 23 Hold Street. By then nearly 1,500 Jewish ritual objects and historical relics had been gathered. The opening of the Hungarian Jewish Museum followed only slightly behind similar European institutions (Vienna 1895, Frankfurt, Hamburg 1898, Prague 1906, St. Petersburg 1914).

By 1932 the museum building was completed, as a wing that stylistically matched the main building of the Dohány Street Synagogue. The new permanent exhibition opened on December 26. The Hungarian Jewish Museum gradually assumed an increasingly important role in the cultural and intellectual life of Hungarian Jewry. Communities, families, and individuals contributed valuable items to the collection. However, the anti‑Jewish ideology of the 1930s and the religious‑ and minority‑hostile ideology of the 1950s were hindering factors in the institution’s development.

In 1938, after the first anti‑Jewish law appeared, the museum presented under the title “Emancipation Exhibition” the circumstances of the enactment of the 1867 emancipation law and the process of assimilation of Hungarian Jews. Between 1939 and 1944 the museum hosted the annual fine‑arts exhibitions organized by OMIKE, where artists excluded from other venues because of the Jewish laws could exhibit.

In 1940 the museum staff organized collection tours to gather the memories of the disappearing rural congregations. Because of the war threat, in 1942 part of the museum’s material was placed in the basement of the Magyar Nemzeti Múzeum. In 1943 further valuables were intended to be stored in bank safes, but these later disappeared during the war.

After the liberation, already in 1945 the museum compiled a survey of the material heritage of the destroyed rural communities, of synagogues and cemeteries. The museum reopened its doors to visitors on July 4, 1947. In 1960 a comprehensive exhibition titled “From Slavery to Freedom” opened on the history of the Holocaust and Jewish liberation. In 1984 a new permanent exhibition was opened on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the deportations in Hungary.

In 1972 the Magyar Zsidó Levéltár opened in the Országos Rabbiképző Intézet, which was then merged with the museum in 1994, after which the institution’s official name became Magyar Zsidó Múzeum és Levéltár (Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives).

In 1993 the museum’s almost entire displayed collection was stolen; the valuables were only found in the spring of 1994 in Romania.

In 2016 the museum building was comprehensively restored and a new permanent exhibition titled Tamid (Hungarian: always, constantly, repeatedly) was created, which presents Jewish life according to the order of the holidays. In the exhibition, alongside Jewish relics, there are also works by notable Hungarian painters of Jewish origin, such as Ámos Imre, Fényes Adolf, Perlmutter Izsák, Köves Izsó.