Prague, Sept 10 (CTK) – An exhibition focusing on the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Jews from central and eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries has been prepared by the Jewish Museum in Prague and opened in the Robert Guttmann Gallery.
It is the third in a series of exhibitions on refugees the museum has prepared recently.
To highlight the then emigration wave, the exhibition presents paintings of Belgian artists Eugeen Van Mieghem and also the documents of a shipping company that assisted in transferring refugees to America.
The exhibition “The Missing Images – Eugeen Van Mieghem and Jewish Emigrants to the New World” will run through April 2016.
It follows up the museum’s previous exhibitions focusing on Jewish refugees during WWI and WWII, and on the post-war wandering of thousands of homeless Jews who survived concentration camps but still had to flee pogroms or they headed for Palestine.
The new exhibition highlights the emigration of European Jews a century ago. The first wave left Europe in 1881 after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, and further ones after the big pogroms in Kishinev (Chisinau) in 1903 and after the defeat of the revolution in Russia in 1905.
Later, more than 2.5 million Jews left eastern Europe between 1918 and 1939.
In total, eastern Europe was left by almost one third of all its Jewish inhabitants in a half century.
One of the main centres of their emigration was the Antwerp harbour and the Belgian shipping company Red Star Line, which transferred about 2.4 million eastern European emigrants, including hundreds of thousands of Jews from eastern Europe, Ukraine and Russia, to America by 1934.
Van Miehghem (1875-1930) depicted the mass exodus in Antwerp where he spent almost all his life.
