The Jews in Lublin - Biblioteka Multimedialna Teatrnn.pl - Brama ...

Along with conscientious sectors of the Jewish community in early 20th Century,
the Polish State and Ukrainian civil institutions started to actively develop the idea
of studying, preserving and popularizing Jewish culture and traditions. By that time
at least two Lviv museums, the City Museum of Crafts (founded in 1874) and the
Museum of the Shevchenko Scientific Society (founded in 1895), had already been
collecting interesting items of Jewish ethnography and art. As mentioned earlier, in
1933 the City Museum of Crafts organized a large exhibition of Jewish art. Maximilian
Goldsteins collections and the judaica of the Museum of the Shevchenko Scientific
Society presented mainly ethnographic artifacts; the City Museum of Arts mainly
gathered the items of Jewish decorative and applied art, while the collection of the
newly established Museum of the Jewish Community presented synagogue textiles
and household articles. The majority of these artifacts were donated to the museum
depositary by synagogues and private collectors, while some of them were purchased
from the Foundation of the Society of Friends of the Jewish Museum in Lviv.
The gradual and natural development of the Galician Jews' cultural life was brutally
and tragically interrupted by the Communist and Nazis regimes. After Western
Ukraine was annexed by the Soviet Union in September 1939, virtually all private and
public collections were nationalized. In 1940, the collections of the Museum of the
Jewish Community were passed to the City Museum of Crafts. During the German
occupation, Maximilian Goldstein voluntary donated his collection to this museum
where he was employed as a research officer. By the end of World War II the cultural
monuments of the Galician Jews had been mostly gathered in two museums in Lviv -
the City Museum of Crafts and the Ethnographic Museum of the Academy of Arts of
Ukraine (formerly the Museum of the Shevchenko Scientific Society). In 1951 these
two museums were united to form the Museum of Ethnography and Crafts at the
Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Thus, at present this museum possesses the largest
and most valuable collection, which represents the cultural heritage of Galician Jews
from the 17th to 20th Century. Moreover, the monuments of Jewish cultural heritage
are located in three other Lviv museums: the Lviv History Museum, the Lviv Art Gallery,
and the Lviv Museum of Religious History.
In the times of the Communist totalitarianism control the Jewish collections were
not accessible to the wider circles of interested people; moreover, to study or promote
them was virtually impossible. The size of the Jewish population of Lviv reduced considerably.
By 1989, the last year of the Soviet Unions existence, 12,823 Jews resided
in Lviv, which constituted 1.58% of the total population. In the Lviv region they
took the forth place in number, after Ukrainians, Russians and Poles — that is, 14,240
people or 0.5 % of the total number of inhabitants.
After Ukraine regained its independence, in 1992 the Lviv Society of Jewish Culture,
named after Sholom-Alejhem, was registered; it had 1,100 members and published
the "Shofar" newspaper. In 1998, the Academy of Ukrainian Jewish History and
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