Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art

The Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was founded in 1966 as the Gershon & Rebecca Fenster Museum of Jewish Art, through the cooperative efforts of several local Jewish families.Their purpose was to bring the local Jewish community an understanding of its heritage through artifacts, as well as to serve as a resource center for non-Jews to learn about Jewish history and culture. The Museum's founding coincided with the acquisition of a collection of Judaica facilitated by Sherwin Miller, the museum's first curator. In 2000, the Fenster Museum was renamed the Sherwin Miller Museum in recognition of Mr. Miller's seminal vision.

This brass cabinet is from the extensive art collection of Gershon Fenster, after whom the Museum first was named. Gershon Fenster's efforts centered on fostering arts and letters in his homeland, Lithuania, and in his adopted home, Tulsa. His life work was tied to educational principles and the development and support of progressive education. Because of his close ties to the arts -- as a collector and philanthropist -- his memory remains alive in the work of the Museum.

The cabinet from Mr. Fenster's collection represents one of the major works of art made by a workshop\studio that was founded in Jerusalem around the turn of the century by an artist named Boris Schatz. Boris Schatz was the chief sculptor at the royal Bulgarian court, but when he heard the speeches of Zionist Leader Theodor Hertzl, he felt that it was his duty to go to Palestine and to set up an art academy. His intention was to teach Jewish students not only art but a Jewish kind of art. Many Jewish artifacts and art works are basically related to the art of the people that Jews in their dispersion lived among, the vernacular cultures. But Boris Schatz wanted to found a new kind of art -- a Jewish art that used Jewish themes and Jewish designs. Crafted around 1920, this cabinet, used in a home for storing ceremonial objects, was made by Schatz himself and is typical of the school. All of the images on the cabinet are associated with aspects of Jewish learning or culture.

The school that Boris Schatz founded was called the Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, after the biblical artisan who made the Ark of the Covenant. At its height, Boris Schatz' school employed 400 artists, turning out a wide variety of objects, but, after Schatz died in 1932, his school was closed. Today it has been resurrected as the Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

The first object acquired by the Collectors' Group of the FMJA (formed in 1968) was this Yemenite bride's wedding headdress (gargush) a hood-like garment, gold brocade for festive use, appliqued with coins from the dowry. These hoods cover the hair entirely and are not worn after menopause. Donations of many other objects by the Collector's Group followed this initial contribution. The Collectors' Group has expanded into the Museum's current general membership.

The Museum has regularly offered programs to the public since its founding, exhibiting the work of such artists as Bernard Solomon, Raffi Kaiser; Gail Rubin, David Halpern and Chaim Hendin. Major exhibitions have included: "Anne Frank in the World: 1930-1945;" "Creativity Under Duress: From Gulag to Glasnost;" and "Prairie Landsmen: The Jews of Oklahoma." The painting above, Jonah at Haifa Port, by Russian artist Eugene Abeshaus, was acquired during the "Creativity Under Duress" exhibition in 1991.

The Sherwin Miller Museum is the flagship of The Fenster/Sanditen Cultural Center. As an arts education institution, and the only American Jewish museum in the region, The Sherwin Miller Museum utilizes both art and history to preserve and present Jewish culture. We also serve as the Jewish Historical Society of Oklahoma.