Maya Zack, The Shabbat Room 1

The first image confronts the past with the present. Malzgasse 16 was the last address of the old Jewish Museum before its destruction by the Nazis in 1938. The boxes in the foreground and upper left corner could suggest the confiscation of the objects and also the further wanderings of these items. During the Shoah, most of them were given to the Museum of Ethnology. Those that remained were returned to the Vienna Jewish Community (IKG). Since 1996 the few surviving objects from the "Gute Stube" have been exhibited in a glass showcase (seen in the center of the image) in the Visible Display area on the third floor of the new Jewish Museum Vienna founded in 1988. The easel recalls that Kaufmann himself also painted in the Shabbat room – for example, the unfinished "Friday Evening," now in the Jewish Museum in New York. The project was made possible thanks to the generous financial support of the Association of FRIENDS, Sotheby’s Kunstauktionen GesmbH, and the Frey familiy.