Name: A Man who was a Museum. Lecture by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern
Start: 2025-09-04T17:15:00+02:00
Location: Goldschmidtstraße 28, 04103 Leipzig, Germany

A Man who was a Museum. Lecture by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg was a center of Jewish life for seven hundred years. This city, now in western Ukraine is exceptionally reach in history as it belonged to Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before the 18th century partitions, to Austria-Hungary before WWI, and to independent Poland between the two world wars.
The idea of creating a Jewish museum in Lviv dates back to the early 20th century. Before WWII, Lviv boasted two Jewish museums, one functioning from the 1920s at a private apartment of the Galician Judaica collector Maximilian Goldstein, another, established in 1934 at the communal center, as the Museum of the Lviv Jewish Gemeinde. Both museums existed as rival institutions, until Lviv was occupied by the Soviet Union in September 1939, and then by the German Wehrmacht in June 1941. Both collections, for various reasons, ended up at the Lviv Museum of Arts and Crafts, which hired Maximilian Goldstein to work on the inventory of several thousand Judaica collection artifacts.
Using the life and accomplishments of Maximilian Goldstein, the public lecture by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern will elucidate the paradoxical fate of the pre-1939 Lviv Jewish museums before, during, and after World War II. What happened to one of the richest pre-war European collections of Judaica artifacts? Join us to explore how a collector saved artifacts and how the artifacts sought to, but failed to save the collector.
The speaker, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, is the Crown Family Chair of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in History Department at Northwestern University. His research was supported by the DAAD Foundation, Rothschild Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, Davis Center at Harvard University, Center for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Toronto, the Kosciuszko Foundation, the Memorial Foundation of Jewish Culture, L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, the Lady Davis Foundation, the NADAV Foundation, Israel Institute Fund, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University (three times), Jerusalem, among others.
He has published more than a hundred and fifty articles, seven books, and seven edited volumes, four of these award-winning, including »The Golden-Age Shtetl: a New History of Jewish Life in East Europe«, 2014, 2nd ed. 2015) and »Jews and Ukrainians: a millennium of coexistence (2016, co-authored with Paul Robert Magocsi; 2nd ed. 2018). His »Anti-Imperial Choice was a book winner of the North American Association of Ukrainian Studies and of the Canadian »Encounter« Prize. His »Golden Age Shtetl« was nominated for Pulitzer Prize and won a National Jewish Book Award. His essays, books, and book chapters have appeared in Greek, Spanish, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, French, Hebrew, and German.
Photo: Maximilian Goldstein in his apartment at Nowy Swiat Street, Lwów (Lviv), late 1920s. Courtesy of the Museum of Ethnography of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.