"Wandering Stars" - the first exhibition after the onset of the pandemic to which the Museum has loaned exhibits

On the 2nd of March the exhibition "Wandering Stars: Soviet Jewry in Pre-War Art" was opened in the "Na Shabolovka" gallery (a member of the Association for Moscow Exhibition Halls). The Museum of Jewish History in Russia has loaned to this exhibition about 70 original exhibits, as well as some materials to aid the project's audiovisual component.
As a partner in the exhibition our museum was tasked with providing authentic material for creating an accurate atmosphere of the time. Therefore, not only graphic works of Jewish artists were loaned to the exhibition, but also mementos of Jewish everyday life. Many of such objects remained unchanged from the beginning of the 20th century being kept in families and communities until the very mention of the Jewish community, ancestral religion or distinctive national culture has been finally pushed back to the boundaries of the social context. Many ritual objects changed their purpose, turning into household items, some things were simply hidden "until better times". The exhibition is dedicated to the Soviet pre-war decades, when the diversity of Russian Jewish culture was step by step replaced by promulgated casual Soviet uniformity. Being gradually transformed, this culture faded into the shadows.
"The subject of Soviet nation-building is considered to be a territory of propaganda, which was initially enlivened by the experiments of the national avant-gardes. The Jewish avant-garde was one of the brightest among them: its main incarnation was the work of the Artistic Section of the League for Jewish Culture (Kultur-League). After its de facto liquidation in the mid-1920s, the party gradually tightened its control over the outline of the Soviet Jewry's image and related motives, so that by the end of the 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s, the Jewish theme in the USSR was in the shadow of "supranational" politics, combined with anti-religious pathos".

You can find more detailed information about the exhibition and its partners on the Gallery website: https://www.nashabolovke-gallery.com/wandering-stars.