Reportage

The small-scale Jewish museums in Chișinău (Moldova), Odessa (Ukraine), Lviv (Ukraine), and Minsk (Belarus) narrate the history of once flourishing Jewish communities, and document their disappearance. Their permanent collections, which consist of the private belongings that emigrating Jewish families gave them in the early 1990s, are the basis for their exhibitions. These museums opened in the early 2000s under the auspices of local Jewish cultural and charitable organizations. They are not state museums and lack a solid financial foundation and stable professional curatorial team. Much depends on the personal vision of their directors. Despite both limited exhibition space and locations not frequented by tourists, these museums are important agents of memory and identity for local Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, as well as for international visitors

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Ethnology · Exhibition · Flourishing · Identity (music · Jewish identity · Judaism · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Museums and Cultural Heritage · Polish-Jewish Holocaust Memory Studies · Psychology