The Library of JTS is filled with treasures representing Jewish life and creativity from ancient times to the present. We invite you to visit our ongoing series of public exhibitions or view highlights here on our website. Individuals wishing to view library exhibitions may come to JTS during Library hours. Scheduled tours will be included in our exhibit listings.

New Exhibit

A Sacred Space: Synagogue Architecture and Identity

October 26, 2023–March 7, 2024

The upcoming JTS Library exhibit, A Sacred Space: Synagogue Architecture and Identity, offers an exciting opportunity to view a large selection of rare prints depicting historic synagogues. The exhibit, co-curated by Samuel D. Gruber and Sharon Liberman Mintz, will trace the history of European synagogue styles from the 17th to the 19th century, exploring how the image of the synagogue was used by Christians and Jews to present often conflicting ideas of Jewish identity. The 42 prints on view—selected from books, art prints, magazines, and newspapers—showcase a wide range of synagogue types. Notably, the pace of production of these images accelerated in the 19th century, when we first encounter Jewish architects of synagogues, along with the Jewish artists who depicted them.

The exhibit will feature images of synagogues from the Netherlands, England, France, Austria, and Germany, ending on American shores. Images of the latter will allow us to consider how this pictorial tradition would evolve in a country of immigrants that boasted of religious freedom and cultural pluralism.

Watch Riva Arnold, Research Associate of Judaica at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and professor in the Art History department at the School of Visual Arts, speak about this exhibit. This lecture was given to the Harry G. Friedman Society, a Judaica collectors group.

Watch a Video from A Sacred Space: Synagogue Architecture and Identity

Previous Exhibits

Living Yiddish in New York

This exhibit introduced visitors to rare archival materials that provided a snapshot of New York City as an important center of modern Yiddish culture. Between 1880 and 1924, approximately two million Eastern European Jews immigrated to the United States. Many of them settled in New York City, which by 1914 was home to 1.4 million Jews, among them the world’s largest urban population of Yiddish speakers.

Materials on display include examples of the ways Yiddish-speaking Jews responded to the challenges of their new home, while also ensuring the continuity of Yiddish culture. Through this collection of historic images and documents, visitors will witness the living Yiddish culture of one of the world’s greatest cities.

Watch Videos from Living Yiddish in New York

The Work of Her Hands: The Art of Lynne Avadenka and the Craft of Jewish Women Printers

This exhibit featured a selection of rare books printed by Jewish women from the earliest days of Hebrew publishing alongside new artwork created by American artist/printmaker Lynne Avadenka. 

Read an article about the exhibit in the Forward.

Read an interview with Lynne Avadenka in PRINT Magazine.

Lynne Avadenka is known for her works that explore text and image, the physical and philosophical idea of the book, and the mystery and beauty of visual language. In August 2021, she was artist-in-residence at the Cary Graphic Arts Collection of the Rochester Institute of Technology. Avadenka received the 2021 Isaac Anolic Artist Book Award, along with artist collaborators Andi Arnovitz and Mirta Kupferminc, and in 2019, she was given a Research Award from the Hadassah Brandeis Institute. Other awards include a 2009 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship and individual artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Arts and Culture Council. She received her MFA from Wayne State University.

Watch a Video from The Work of Her Hands

The Jews of Corfu: Between the Adriatic and the Ionian

This unprecedented exhibition offered a window into the rich history and culture of the little-known Jewish communities of Corfu. Columbia University and JTS, two of the world’s largest repositories of rare materials from Corfu, displayed a selection of illustrated prayer books, historical documents, celebratory poems, and elaborately decorated ketubbot telling the story of the island’s vibrant, distinct, and sometimes contentious Jewish communities. Situated on a major trade route, these communities thrived under Venetian and then Greek rule from the Middle Ages until 1944, when the Jews of Corfu were almost entirely annihilated by the Nazis. 

Watch Videos from The Jews of Corfu

To Build a New Home: Celebrating the Jewish Wedding

To Build a New Home: Celebrating the Jewish Wedding featured a collection of rare materials illustrating the creative, often surprising, evolution of Jewish marriage practices over centuries.  

The many treasures on view included lavishly decorated ketubbot, marriage contracts, from 17th and 18th century Italy; a 13th-century French religious compendium outlining marriage rituals and including a bawdy wedding poem; a fragment from a 12th-century prenuptial agreement; and from the modern era, a ketubbah making it possible for Jewish women to initiate a religious divorce.  

“To Build a New Home” showed the remarkable development of Jewish marriage from Talmudic times to the present—and the rich streams of tradition and innovation in Jewish life throughout history.  

Watch Videos From To Build a New Home

Curator Sharon Liberman-Mintz discusses a beautifully decorated Venetian ketubbah from 1749 that is in the collection of The Library of JTS.
It turns out the huppah was not always the central element of Jewish weddings that it is today. Explore the evolution of this tradition with Dr. David Kraemer, professor director of The JTS Library.

Dr. David Kraemer examines a beatiful 1769 ketubbah from a Karaite community in Ukraine and discusses the Karaites’ particular Jewish beliefs and history.