After the 1938 November Pogrom – Kristallnacht, known as ‘the Night of Broken Glass’, when shopfronts splintered across Germany and Austria and homes burned, a group of Bradford Jews in West Yorkshire gathered to ask what they could do. Their answer was profoundly human and, therefore, radical: they opened their doors.
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Provenance is the story of how objects from the past reach us in the present. It informs their historical value and authenticity. It tells how things move: the routes they take through lives, countries, and institutions; the hands that protect them, the bureaucracies that process them, the circumstances that allow them to remain. It can turn the everyday or ephemeral into the extraordinary. To work with Holocaust-era collections is to work inside those journeys, to follow the winding and uneven paths through which objects survive.
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In the lead up to the second world war, Jewish families across Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and other European countries packed hurriedly, hoping to find safety beyond their borders. They often sold what they could and surrendered the rest to the German state; their homes and savings exchanged for the right to leave.
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