Jewish Museum

The first thing you learn about the Jewish Museum in Prague is this: it did not grow from a single building, but from a network of synagogues and memorial sites that together tell a continental story of loss and resilience. The museum is an umbrella for a collection that numbers roughly 40,000 Judaica objects, 100,000 books, and a vast archive of Czech Jewish community histories. Its claim to fame rests not only on its holdings but on its founding mission in 1906, when historians Dr. Hugo Lieben and Augustin Stein established an institution to document centuries of Czech Jewish life and to salvage artifacts from synagogues that had been demolished in early 20th‑century urban renewal.

The opening act of this story carries a haunting counterpoint: during the Nazi occupation, the museum’s role shifted in a grim, bureaucratic way. The institution became the Central Bureau for Jewish Emigration, later renamed the Central Bureau for Arrangement of the Jewish Question in Bohemia and Moravia. An employee of the Prague Jewish community, Karel Stein (1906–1961), suggested that the community’s property be brought into the museum’s custody, effectively preserving pieces that the Nazis deemed valuable works of art.