Women Patrons of the First Jewish Museum

Although the founders of the first Jewish Museum were all men, the museum was supported from the very beginning by women through donations and endowments.

Among the museum’s corresponding members were several women, including the writer and journalist Nahida Ruth Lazarus, who had converted to Judaism in 1895. In her literary work she engaged extensively with Jewish themes and, at the invitation of the Jewish Museum, also gave lectures in Vienna.

In December 1905, the museum received a significant donation from Rosa Gomperz of Budapest. She was the mother‑in‑law of the renowned scholar of religion and collector David Kaufmann.

Among the objects preserved to this day at the Jewish Museum Vienna is a pair of Rimmonim that she donated to the museum.

Women very often donated Torah textiles or traditional garments to the museum—items they had either made themselves or that had been passed down within their families.

Betty Adler, wife of musicologist Guido Adler, donated a silk Torah curtain to the museum, made from the wedding dress of her grandmother, Babette Berger.

Very closely connected with the first Jewish Museum was Adele von Mises, born in 1858 in Brody, Galicia. Her family history reflects the transition of Galician Jews from Orthodoxy to the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah).

Her grandmother, Sure Kallir, was still deeply pious and dressed in the style of traditional Orthodox Jewish women: after her wedding she was not permitted to show her own hair and wore a wig—called a sheytl—with a cap over it. On the Sabbath and holidays, she wore a special festive headdress known as the Sterntichel.

Photographic documentation of the first Jewish Museum also shows that Adele von Mises donated three doll models to the museum, of which only one has survived to this day.

Von Mises died in 1937, one year before the Nazi takeover, and is buried at Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof. Her two sons, Ludwig and Richard von Mises, survived the Second World War in the United States.