Illuminated,When Rene Braginsky came across a rare illustrated bentscher, he couldn’t have foreseen the astounding collection that he’d amass over the next three decades. That first encounter with a historical art form led him to seek out hundreds of manuscripts and books from seven centuries of Jewish life. When Mishpacha viewed the selection of those manuscripts currently on display in the Yeshiva University Museum, we were treated to an experience that went far beyond aesthetics.
“Mr. Rene Braginsky was thinking about giving a special bentscher” says Sharon Mintz a curator of Jewish art and consultant for renowned auction house Sotheby’s. “Then a good friend introduced him to a dealer in rare Jewish books who offered him an illustrated one.”
This was over thirty years ago and the friend was Dutch collector Michael Floerscheim z”l. Floerscheim’s passion for Judaica was contagious and since that first purchase the now sixty-year-old Braginsky has been steadily amassing what has become one of the world’s premier collections of Jewish rare books and manuscripts. Braginsky began collecting by choosing what appealed to him aesthetically his personal predilection being for colorful artistically embellished manuscripts. Today while the collection is still dominated by illuminated manuscripts it also contains many papers and books of scholarly and historic significance.
Sharon Mintz originally flew to Zurich in 2004 to select items for an exhibit on rare printed Talmuds having stumbled upon Braginsky’s name and been told he could help. She had no idea that this collector who was hardly a household name in the world of Judaica was sitting on a collection of such scope and value — until Braginsky allowed her to sift through his astounding holdings. To her great fortune and ours as well after the Talmud exhibit finished its run in 2005 Braginsky decided to share the wealth of his collection by offering to display it for the public.
A team of experts including Menachem Schmelzer an Israeli scholar and distant relative of Braginsky as well as Mintz and other experts cataloged the collection and produced a state-of-the-art website that displays photos of every item (one can click through every page of every book on the site as well as move a cursor to “unroll” each megillah scroll to see its entirety). After that surely feeling like kids in a candy store the team members were forced to narrow their selections for an exhibition culling about 130 items out of an inventory of over 600.
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