Jewish Marriage Contracts: Collection of Kettubot

Jewish Marriage Contracts: Collection of Kettubot is an extended catalog of the exhibition of Jewish Marriage Contracts (Ketubot) taking place in Lviv Voznytskyi National Gallery of Arts in 2015-2016. Several more research texts were added to the exhibition catalog.

The editor of the collection, Vita Susak, wrote a preface where she offered a historical and art review of the 14 kettubot and Judaica items of Italian origin re-discovered in the Gallery stock in 2010. In her contribution, Natalka Filevych recounts about the details of the finding. Serhiy Kravtsov presented a fundamental overview of the biography and collecting, and art activities of the owner of the kettubot, Dr. Marek Reichenstein (1876-1932), a Lvivite, who was fond of collecting art pieces and studying subjects of Jewish culture and history, in addition to his medical practices. Upon his demise, the Reichenstein collections created the basis for the museum of Lviv religious Jewish community that survived the war and became part of several Lviv museums. Shaloma Sabar presents a history of creation and functioning of the kettubot as a social and art phenomenon in the global context while focusing on early Modernist and Modernist Italy.

The exhibition catalog has images of the items followed by detailed explanations and comments.

The publication was a result of a larger scale project to study and promote the collection of Jewish marriage contracts organized by Lviv Voznytskyi National Gallery of Arts and the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe, in partnership with the Institute of Folk Studies of the NAS of Ukraine and the Center for Jewish Art of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.