Jewish Art Treasures From Prague

"The 1980 exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, for which this is the catalogue, comprises 300 of the finest examples drawn from the State Jewish Museum, Prague which houses the most important collections of Judaica in the world. It is the only showing of this extensive exhibition in the West. The Jewish ritual art included in it spans the period from the late Renaissance to the early twentieth century and includes synagogue textiles, historic and decorative work in silver and other metals, paintings depicting the elaborate ritual of the late eighteenth-century Prague Burial Brotherhood, glass and ceramics. From the twentieth century come drawings and paintings by adult artists and by some of the thousands of children who were imprisoned in the Terezín concentration camp and who died as victims of the holocaust. Exhibition and catalogue offer a glimpse of the rich heritage of Jewish life in Central Europe since the Middle Ages, and a modest memorial to the Jewish community in Bohemia and Moravia who were virtually exterminated by the Nazis."--Publisher's description.