Weekly Jewish holiday – Shabbat – concludes on Saturday evening with the Havdalah ceremony, which means "separation" in Hebrew. One of the ritual acts accompanying the ceremony is the smelling of fragrant roots, herbs, or crushed rose petals. They are placed in a decorative spice tower over which a blessing is recited (M. Goldstein, K. Dresdner, Kultura i sztuka ludu żydowskiego na ziemiach polskich, Lwów 1935, pp. 40–41). The scent of the herbs is symbolically meant to invigorate the body that has been left by the additional Shabbat soul (Hebrew: neshamah yeteirah). It is also believed to help the faithful cope with the hardships of the coming week. The forms of spice towers have changed over different periods but with the preservation of traditional designs - – they usually had the shape of towers, buildings or boxes. The most popular type were the tower-shaped besamin boxes, a reference to the fortress and fortified tower that is a biblical symbol of God.
The besamim box from the collection of the Lublin Open Air Village Museum is in the shape of a tower. The walls of the container are decorated with embossed ornaments, in one of them there is a door in a shape resembling two united Tables of the Covenant. Four movable flags are placed on the upper corners of the container. The whole is set on a baluster-shaped shaft and surmounted by a spire ending in a ball with a flag. The upper part (above the spire shaft) was later made of stainless steel.
The item was purchased for the collection of the Lublin Open Air Village Museum in the "Desa" Works of Art and Antiques store in Przemyśl in 1972.
