‘I had never seen anything like them before’: Sydney’s mysterious rimmomim

Dr Jana Vytrhlik, curator of the Great Synagogue museum in Sydney, takes Steve Meacham on a tour of the collection and waxes lyrical about one of its gems

CZECH-BORN DR Jana Vytrhlik - curator of one of Australia’s least known cultural museums - doesn’t look like a detective. But appearances can be deceptive.

She recently completed her doctoral thesis at the University of Sydney researching the visual legacy of Jewish Sydney in the 19th century and hopes to publish a book on the subject.

Jana’s research began in 2014, when she was still working at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, preparing for a lecture about Jewish ornaments for the Silver Society of Australia.

Knowing little about the collection at Sydney’s Great Synagogue, the academic rang the founding curator of the synagogue’s AM Rosenblum Museum to ask if it had any relevant examples she could use to illustrate her talk.

It was then Jana became aware of a mysterious pair of striking rimmonim, the symbolic ritual silverware that adorns the twin poles of the Torah scroll as it is ceremonially dressed and paraded around the synagogue.

Having already gained her first doctorate in her native country while working with the world’s largest Judaica collection in Prague, Jana was astonished when she first spied the Great Synagogue’s rimmonim.

“I had never seen anything like them before,” Jana recalls. “In Prague and central Europe, most of the objects are Ashkenazic. These were very different. More elaborate, gilded and with more little bells, closer to the Sephardic style. “But no-one knew when they had been made, who for, or how they got to Australia.”

Jana resigned from the Powerhouse Museum, where she had worked since she arrived in Australia in 1986 (and had curated Precious Legacy, a 1998 exhibition featuring objects from Prague’s Jewish Museum) to begin a second doctorate.