Located in the Jacob Reingold Pavilion, on the grounds of the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale, New York, the Derfner Judaica Museum occupies a newly expanded 5,000 square feet exhibition space in the Jacob Reingold Pavilion at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale.
The Art Collection at The Hebrew Home at Riverdale, comprises of over 4,500 paintings, prints, photographs, and sculpture, ranging from contemporary works by such artists as Alex Katz, Ben Shahn, and Andy Warhol, to Native American decorative arts and African sculpture. Rotating exhibitions, featuring the work of both established and emerging artists, are changed every six to eight weeks.
The museum, which opened to the public on June 11, 2009, is a cultural and educational center that provides exhibitions relating to Jewish history and contemporary Jewish culture. The inaugural exhibition of the museum – Tradition and Remembrance: Treasures of the Derfner Judaica Museum – explored the intersections of Jewish history and memory. The stories of objects used in traditional Jewish practice were interpreted in light of the role of memory in shaping both individual and communal identities.
The exhibition featured a silver filigree Kiddush cup, circa 1911; an early copper alloy Hanukkah lamp, from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design founded in Jerusalem in 1906; a set of 18th century German Torah tools from Meerholz, Germany; a velvet fish-scale embroidered matzah cover from turn-of-the-century Jerusalem.
Rotating exhibits are based on the museum’s 1,000 object collection, and it has also presented exhibits of Jewish art and artifacts from other private collections, museums and art schools. One of the more unusual exhibitions at the museum was a show titled ‘Culture as Commodity’ that offered a variety of Judaica-related items, including Israeli Coca-Cola t-shirts, purchased from eBay and other Internet auction sites.
The museum was funded in part by a furnishing grant received from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
The Judaica Museum was founded in 1982, when Riverdale residents Ralph and Leuba Baum donated their collection of Jewish ceremonial art to the Home. A refugee from Nazi persecution, Ralph Baum (1907-1984) and his wife, Leuba (d. 1997), had an intense desire to preserve and pass on to future generations the memory embodied in the objects they collected, the majority of which were used primarily by European Jews before the Holocaust.
In 2008 the Judaica Museum was named in honor of benefactors Helen and Harold Derfner, and has reopened in this newly furnished space.
