Among inscriptions, "Charity shall avert death." Almost all members of this 600 year old community were deported to death camps on June 13, 1942.
Place of origin: Kolyn, Poland/Czech Republic
Audio transcript:
Tzedakah boxes, from the Hebrew root word tzedek, meaning justice, are used for collecting money for charity. This one accepts donations through an upraised pewter hand and stores them in a round container with Hebrew engravings meaning “Charity shall avert death.”
Funds donated to it were used for the Benevolent society and the Burial society of the Holy Congregation of Kolyn. This group was a chevra kadisha, or “holy society,” an organization that undertakes the process of tahara, or purification, for the dead. A chevra kadisha uses volunteer work and congregant donations to conform to the rituals of burial at no cost to the family of the deceased.
This box’s funds went to the chevra kadisha, but what the 600-year-old Polish Jewish community of Kolyn was best known for was its yeshiva, an institution for Jewish scholarship focusing on the Talmud, the Torah, and law.
Almost all members of the Kolyn community were deported to death camps on June 13, 1942, three days after the Nazis killed the entire male population of nearby Ladice in response to the assassination of the Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia.
Recently, the town of Kolyn’s synagogue has been restored and turned into a Jewish museum.