Objects

Holiday prayer book (Hebrew: machzor) from the collection of the Regional Museum in Pińczów. An inscription on one of the pages informs us that it belonged to Amos Nachum. The first part consists of 40 pages, the next 352 pages and the last 272 pages. The Hebrew title of the prayer book is Machzor Raba. Underneath is information on the publisher and the printing of the copy: A. Kahan, 39 Nalewki Street, Warsaw. Druk Pośpiech, 32 św. Jerska Street, Warsaw.

Nalewki was the most commercial street in pre-war Warsaw. Several bookshops operated there. In the tenement at no 39, one of these was run by Abraham Kahan. "The interior was dark, full of shelves piled with hundreds of books [...]. But at Kahan's, my attention was drawn to books written in Yiddish. Pulling them off the top shelves, I imagined I was discovering a lost civilisation..." – this is an excerpt from an article by Jerzy S. Majewski, Nalewki: najbardziej handlowa ulica w dziejach Warszawy, "Gazeta Wyborcza", 2 September 2021 (https://warszawa.wyborcza.pl/warszawa/1,54420,12395364,Nalewki__najbardziej_handlowa_ulica_w_dziejach_Warszawy.html, access: 1 October 2021).