Jewish Museum in Prague, Robert Guttmann Gallery, Praha 1, U
Staré školy 3 From August 17 until October 6, 2006, open daily 9
a.m. – 6 p.m. except Saturdays and Jewish holidays The Jewish
Museum in Prague in one of the oldest such institutions in
Europe. Yet it was not the first to be established in what was
to become Czechoslovakia. That distinction belongs to the Jewish
Community of Mladá Boleslav who several years earlier put
together a small collection of ritual objects that were not in
use. The Jewish Museum in Prague, however, represented the true
beginning of Jewish museology in the country. This attempt to
look back and capture Judaism’s past glory was influenced in
particular by the growing tendency among Prague Jews to blend in
with the society at large through assimilation and
liberalization. The Wissenschaft des Judentums (the Science of
Judaism) was created as a reaction to these trends; its mission
was to investigate Jewish history and culture by using objective
scientific methods and thereby re