Stockholm's Jewish Museum: Safeguarding a Lost Art

The Jewish Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, stands at Själagårdsgatan 19 in Gamla stan. In 1987, Viola and Aron Neuman founded the museum in an old rug warehouse in Frihamnen. In 1992, the museum moved from Frihamnen to Vasastan, where it was housed in a building at Hälsingegatan 2 that had been designed by Ragnar Östberg as a girls' school.

In 2019, the museum moved once again to its current location in Gamla stan, at the site of an 18th-century synagogue. During renovations of the new site, curators used diagrams from 1811 to uncover 19th-century murals that had been covered with several layers of paint. Because most German-inspired synagogue art was destroyed during the Second World War, the Stockholm murals are an important cultural resource.

The Jewish Museum's collection is devoted to objects and environments related to Jewish religion, tradition, and history, particularly in connection to Judaism in Sweden. Its permanent exhibition, The Jews & Sweden, explores topics such as Jewish immigration to Sweden, difficulties of life, and the founding of the first congregation.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons