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The holdings consist of nearly 6,000 photographs taken by Sergey Tartakovsky, prints and negatives. The photographs/positives of Eastern European Jewish objects are from the Lviv Museum of Ethnography, the Museum of Historical Treasures of Ukraine in Kyiv, and the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum in Vilnius.

Commissioned by art historian Alexander Kantsedikas, photographer Sergey Tartakovsky (1942–2010) traveled widely in the former Soviet Union documenting the Jewish heritage of the Russian Empire by photographing Jewish art, ceremonial objects in museums and private collections, synagogues, cemeteries, and other Jewish sites.

Photographs/positives: Georgian Jewish objects from a museum in Tbilisi; Hebrew illuminated manuscripts from the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg; “pinkasim” (communal records books) from the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine in Kyiv; modern Jewish art from various museums and painters’ studios, including designs of theater costumes; tombstones from several Jewish cemeteries in Ukraine; Jewish postcards; wooden synagogues in Eastern Europe; photographs from the An-sky collection.

In 2018 the Sergey Tartakovsky Jewish Art Collection was handed to the Blavatnik Archive.

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Translations and Dialogues: The Reception of Russian Art Abroad
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