Hebrew University’s Center for Jewish Art Launches the World’s Largest Index of Jewish Art
Source: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Center for Jewish Art at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem launched the world’s largest online database of Jewish art today at the World Congress of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. The Bezalel Narkiss Index of Jewish Art is a collection of digitized images and information about Jewish artifacts from all over the world. The online collection includes more than 260,000 images of objects and artifacts from 700 museums, synagogues and private collections in 41 different countries, as well as architectural drawings of 1,500 synagogues and Jewish ritual buildings from antiquity to the modern day.
The public can now access the Bezalel Index of Jewish Art and start exploring the world of Jewish art. Amateur or professional researchers easily access more than a quarter of a million images, with accompanying details and descriptions, either by simple keyword search, or according to such categories as Iconographical Subject, Origin, Artist, Object, Community, Collection or Location.
The Center for Jewish Art is the world's foremost institution dedicated to the preservation of the Jewish artistic heritage. The Center's activities include documentation, research, education and publishing. Under the direction of Dr. Vladimir Levin, the Center has in recent years worked steadily toward completing the Index by photographing, measuring and painstakingly describing and categorizing each piece to be made available online to the public.
The extensive collection contains over 100,000 entries in the Jewish Ritual Architecture category alone. “We cannot physically preserve all Jewish buildings everywhere, but we can preserve them visually through documentation and drawings,” said Dr. Levin.
Read more and see some beautiful examples of the online collection here.