Pomurski muzej Murska Sobota

The Pomurje Museum Murska Sobota is a central institution for collecting, preserving, studying and presenting the movable heritage of the whole Pomurje region (27 municipalities). Its main mission is to preserve the material and spiritual wealth that has been generated by the inhabitants of the region – from the very first settlements to present days. The area was strongly influenced by a mixture of cultural influences from the neighbouring countries and regions, as well as by a unique creative spirit deeply rooted in the ethnical, national and religious diversity of the region.

The Museum was established in 1955 on the basis of the collection of the Prekmurje Museum Association. In addition to special collections, the Museum also preserves important archaeological, ethnological and cultural-historical material. Part of the latter is put on display at the Permanent exhibition at the Murska Sobota Castle. The exhibition won the Museum a special award from the European Museum Forum in 1999. The Museum houses a restoration workshop and a rich professional library. It is also involved in publishing, the most important product being a periodical named the Anthology of the Murska Sobota Museum.

The museum has a permanent exhibition entitled People of the Mura. The rooms display rich archeological finds depicting the death and beliefs of prehistoric communities, the Pomurje region during the Roman Empire and Slavic settlement. The religious sphere of the region, characterized by the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish faiths, is then presented, as well as a presentation of ecclesiastical art, etc.

As part of this permanent exhibition (room 14), the museum presents the Second World War section, which tells the story of the occupation of the Pomurje region by the German army in April 1941 and the takeover by the Hungarians ten days later, the uprising organized by members of the Communist Party, which was suppressed early on by arrests and trials and only revived in the autumn of 1944, until the liberation of Prekmurje in April 1945 by Red Army fighters and the only military partisan units, the Prekmurje Troops. The museum also holds a list of victims of the Second World War.

There is no separate material on the Holocaust, but there is material for thematic research on the history of the Jews in the region. The museum owns: a blue and white striped camp dress from the Dachau concentration camp (Inv. No. 510:MUS;Z-0002168); Besamin, an aromatic vessel, from the Jewish synagogue in Murska Sobota (Inv. No. 510:MUS;UZ-0001781); a ritual blessing vessel (qidush) from the Jewish synagogue in Murska Sobota (Inv. No. 510:MUS;UZ-0001780); a ritual Jewish chalice (Inv. No. 510:MUS;UZ-0001848), of unknown origin, but probably from a Jewish family from Prekmurje; ritual candlestick (Inv. No. 510:MUS;UZ-0000031) from the Jewish synagogue in Murska Sobota; Torah, 13 pages (Inv. No. 510:MUS;UZ-0001782) from the Jewish synagogue in Murska Sobota; the double-leaf wooden doors that were part of the furnishings of the Jewish synagogue in Murska Sobota, which was built in 1907 and 1908 in the neo-Romanesque style according to the designs of the Hungarian architect Lipót Baumhorn and demolished in 1954 (Inv. No. 510:MUS;UZ-0002415).

The museum also worked on an inventory of the Jewish heritage in Murska Sobota and the region for the Rediscover project; an interview with Holocaust survivor Erika Fürst (89 years old) was published online (Personal History Files Rediscover DTP2-084-2.2; at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrt-tO74Grw).