The Jewish Museum's Collection

The Jewish Museum of Australia’s Collection has been acquired mostly through donations. The Museum is the custodian of
the community’s history, with a responsibility to preserve and record through material heritage the Australian Jewish
experience. The Collection documents many aspects of Australian Jewish life, beginning with the arrival of Jews with the
First Fleet, and representing in depth major episodes of migration and settlement of the Jews in Australia, to the present.

The Collection includes over 12,000 catalogued items, as well as ‘to be catalogued’ items, some of which are large personal and/or professional archives. Many of the larger personal archives include pre-migration heritage. The Museum’s Collection includes important holdings about the HMT Dunera and the internment of enemy aliens in Australia in the 1940s.

Other significant holdings document the Shanghai Jewish experience pre- and during WWII, emigration, immigration and settlement processes for different waves of Jewish migration.

In 2008 the Museum acquired the Archives of Rabbi Joseph Lipman Gurewicz. Rabbi Joseph Lipman Gurewicz (b. Vilna 1885) arrived in Australia in 1932 and became the spiritual head of the United Congregations of Carlton. Rabbi Gurewicz was a dynamic community leader and an authority in matters of Jewish law.

The significance of this archive resides in its documentation of the various social/communal and religious issues that
onfronted the emerging Eastern European immigrant Jewish community over the two decades of 1930s-1950s – the war
and the immediate post-war years, and the community’s responses to those issues.

The Museum’s principal Collection areas are:

Ritual Judaica including domestic and synagogal Judaica relating to festivals, life cycle events. The Collection includes contemporary Australian Judaica by leading Australian artists.

Historical Judaica and in particular Australian Historical Judaica (‘Judaica Australiana’)
including personal and organisational memorabilia and artefacts documenting personalities, cultural and social movements, communities, places, migration and settlement.

Holocaust Memorabilia including documents, photographs, artefacts, written and audio and video testimonials, correspondence, memorabilia.

Antisemitica

Personal and Family Memorabilia including letters, drawings, personal artefacts, clothing, domestic artefacts, migration artefacts.

Business and Occupational Memorabilia including business records, stationery, advertising, product samples, photographs etc. where a business has been initiated and/or owned by Jewish people and had a broader social or business impact eg. Shmatte Business (rag trade).

Visual Arts including works of art or craft, historical and contemporary, by Australian Jewish artists or artisans, and works
of art or craft on Jewish themes. All types of material are represented in the collection: silver, gold, brass, pewter, textiles, basketry, works on paper, oils, wood, photographs, digital, multi-media.

Access to the Collection
A representative selection of the Museum’s Collection is on exhibition in its four permanent exhibitions: The Timeline of Jewish History, The Jewish Year, Belief and Ritual, the Australian Jewish History Gallery.

With initial financial support from Perpetual Trustees and Arts Victoria, the Jewish Museum purchased KE Emu software to create a digital catalogue of its Collection. With support from the Pratt Foundation we have digitised a selection of our Australian Jewish historical heritage, and using funds from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany Inc (The Claims Conference), we have digitised a selection of our Holocaust heritage. The Bachrach Charitable Trust continues
to support the digitisation of the Dunera Collection.

In 2009 we intend to upload our digitised records.

Reference Library and Archive

The Museum has a reference library onsite. The catalogue is available
The library can be used for research, by appointment only.

Please contact Susan Faine sfaine@jewishmuseum.com.au to organise this.

Uncatalogued archival material that may be accessible for research includes oral histories and self-published memoirs.

Yiddish Library
The Museum’s Yiddish library is not yet fully catalogued. A manual catalogue is being compiled, which will then be digitised
and made accessible on-line.

For all enquiries about the Collection and the Library, please contact Susan Faine sfaine@jewishmuseum.com.au