Tefillin (Hebrew: "prayer items"), or phylacteries, are two leather boxes that men wear on their foreheads and hands during the morning prayer called shacharit according to Jewish tradition. The command to wear them is contained in the Torah, in a verse referring to God's command: "You shall bind them for a sign on your hand, and they shall be for frontlets between your eyes" (Deuteronomy 6:8). Tefillin are used only on weekdays. Sometimes they are stored in decorative cases adorned with plant and geometric motifs. They were made from the skin of a kosher animal, usually cowhide. A parchment scroll with Torah passages (Exodus 13:1-10 and 11-16 and Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:13-21) containing a religious injunction relating to their use was sewn inside the arm-tefillin (see more at: https://www.jhi.pl/artykuly/tefilin-swiete-przedmioty,2314, accessed 15 December 2023).
The tefillin from the collection of the Lublin Village Open Air Museum is intended to be worn on the arm (Hebrew: tefillin shel yad). It was tied to the left arm (on its thickest part, where the muscles form a protrusion) and the hand and forearm were wrapped with a long strap in a special way. It takes the form of a cube-shaped leather container attached to a base sewn together from several layers of leather. The item is one half of a set consisting of two separate containers (Hebrew: batim) with straps, one of which was attached to the arm and the other to the head.
The item was recovered for the Lublin Open Air Village Museum in 1990 from the debris of a cottage in the village of Gorzków (Krasnystaw County, Lubelskie Province). It is housed in a fragmentarily preserved simple case made of cardboard covered with black cloth, inside of which (on the bottom) are the remains of an inscription printed in Hebrew letters in silver "[...] alef [...] shin/ lamed". The inscription is encompassed in a rectangular frame, also in silver.
