Objects

The banjo

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A musical string instrument from the group of plucked instruments - banjo, whose resonance box was made from a fragment of a Torah scroll. It came to the POLIN Museum from the collection of Andrzej Pietrzyk, a collector of ancient instruments. During the renovation of the banjo, he discovered that parchment with a fragment of the Torah was used to construct the instrument. A friend of the collector offered to buy the banjo, with the intention of donating the instrument to the Museum.

The banjo consists of a round sound box and a neck attached to it. Parchment from a Torah scroll is stretched over the sound box. Hebrew inscriptions are visible on the inside of the box. It was reinforced with nails and metal elements. The neck is equipped with eight strings made of wire. The strings are quite loose, which indicates long-term use.

After World War II, Poles, as a result of the enormous pauperisation throughout the country, used things referred to as "borrowed", giving them a different purpose than their original one. The Torah fragment used as a drum membrane is an example of poverty and, at the same time, of a thoughtless attitude towards the Jewish community, which lived next to Poles just before the Holocaust, using this object for a different, religious purpose.

Krzysztof Bielawski in his article The Torah to the Meters ("Miasteczko Poznań" 2018, no. 1, pp. 156-159) marks precisely this faithlessness after the war; he cites the words of a resident of Brzeziny who recalls: "We had no idea what was written there. There was no one to ask. Besides, most of them were simple people with basic education who didn't know what it was all about. Besides, they were fed with anti-Semitic propaganda"; also Kazimierz Jaskulski, the author of a study about the Jews of Maleniec, refers to this issue, writing: "I do not know what happened to the remains of the Torah (...)".

Parchment with the Torah was often used - and considering the reverence that religious Jews had for Torah scrolls, one may think that it was "desecrated" - as material for constructing musical instruments. Krzysztof Bielawski, the author of the book Zagłada cmentarzy żydowskich (Destruction of Jewish cemeteries), points out that there are still many offers for the sale of fragments of Torah scrolls on online auction services. As he reports, one seller wrote: "various Torah fragments at prices ranging from 500 to 10,000 zlotys"; in turn, a Warsaw antiquarian specified a price of 45,000 zlotys for a complete Torah scroll.

Natalia Różańska

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Information about the object
Organization / label
unknown
Object type
musical instrument
Time of creation / dating
20th century
Place of creation
unknown
Technique
forming
rolling
cast
gluing
Material
metal
synthetic material
wood
plant part
Keywords
Copyright status
the object is not protected by copyright law
Owner
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews
Identification number
MPOLIN-M724
Localization
The object is not currently on display
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