Tbilisi hosts Jewish Georgian cultural display

A collection of century-old cultural creations of Georgia's Jewish community are going on display for two weeks at Tbilisi's Dimitri Shevardnadze National Gallery.

The Revived History exhibition will officially open later today and involve nearly 100 exhibits of visual arts, clothing, fabric and religious designation created and used by the Jewish diaspora of Georgia in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The items will reflect local Jewish traditions and events including weddings and religious rituals, while works by pioneering Jewish Georgian painter Shalom Koboshvili will illustrate the community's artistic legacy.

Works of art presented at the exhibition feature Jewish national customs and rituals. Photo from the Georgian National Museum.

The items selected to go on display were restored over the last three years within a project by the Georgian National Museum (GNM) - an administrative body managing museum venues in Georgia including the National Gallery.

Launched in 2014, the restoration effort was supported by the Rothschild Foundation Europe, which works to preserve and research Jewish heritage on the continent.

In the framework of the foundation's cooperation with the GNM, the collection will also be transformed into a virtual display as part of the Google Cultural Institute online project - the largest online partnership of culture and arts organisations aiming to "bring the world's cultural heritage online".

Museum venues in Tbilisi including the Ioseb Grishashvili Tbilisi History Museum (also known as Karvasla) and the Simon Janashia Museum of Georgia, feature rich collections of Jewish heritage within their archives.

In 2014, the list of Georgian venues with Jewish cultural collections was further expanded after the David Baazov Museum of History of the Jews of Georgia and Georgian-Jewish Relations reopened following restoration works.

The exhibition Revived History will run until May 11.