Places of Jewish Life in Harburg

Photo: CSMC

The exhibition ‘Places of Jewish Life in Harburg’ at the Harburg City Museum showed places, people, and events from the Jewish history of this area since the early 17th century. One particularly important exhibit was analysed at the CSMC.

An employee of the museum had found a fragment of a Tora scroll in his father’s estate. The fragment was stolen during the Reichspogromnacht on 9 November 1938 and smeared with Nazi propaganda. However, the handwriting on the fragment could no longer be deciphered with the naked eye: At a later date, someone, presumably the man himself, had apparently tried to remove the writing from the fragment.

The city museum approached the CSMC with this object in the run-up to the exhibition. There, the MSI experts of the Artefact Lab succeeded in making the writing legible again. It was the first time that it could be proven that Tora fragments stolen during the Reichspogromnacht were inscribed with Nazi slogans.