#Exhibit of the Month

One of the great technical achievements that revolutionized the idea of time and space, opening a new era in the history of communication, is telegraphy. It is based on the transmission of electrical signals through a cable over long distances, allowing people to communicate instantly. The telegraph spread very quickly and a network of wires stretched around the world.

In 1837, the American painter and physicist Samuel Morse invented the first electromagnetic device for telegraphy, patented in 1840. To send messages by wire, Morse developed in 1838 a simple code of dots and dashes, which represented the letters of the alphabet, known as "Morse code ".

Both Morse code and the telegraph machine were improved over time, with the telegraph becoming the most widespread system of communication and information transmission for more than a century, until the advent of the Internet. The telegraph system consisted of a series of stations repeaters along the transmission line route. Each station had an operator who received and transmitted messages by telegraph. The Morse machine transmitted about 25 words per minute, which were recorded in code on a paper tape. The operator in charge of transmitting the message would decode it and write it on paper using a special typewriter.

In Bessarabia, the telegraph entered in 1860: on April 8, the Bender telegraph station began its activity, and on April 24, the one in Chisinau, following the construction of the first Odesa-Chisinau-Leova telegraph line. Currently, telegraph services have been discontinued. The only ones who still use coded communication are radio amateurs.

The Morse telegraph machine shown comes from the Osinoostrovsky electrotechnical plant, Soviet Union, and dates back to 1934. The exhibit was restored by Mihail Culașco.

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Exhibitions

„Jewish Presence in the History, Culture and Memory of the Republic of Moldova”

October 12, 2021 – May 30, 2022

The exhibition "Jewish Presence in the History, Culture and Memory of the Republic of Moldova" exhibits the items of the Jewish cultural and historical heritage from the collections of the National Museum of History of Moldova.

The exhibition brings together various heritage items: documents, photographs, awards, works of art, books, clothes, memorabilia and other relics that recreate some aspects of the history of the Jewish community of Moldova and remind of famous figures who made a special contribution to the development of Moldavian culture, science and society on the whole.

The exhibits recreate aspects of the life and work of figures from various fields of culture and science: scientists, composers, architects, musicians, writers, sculptors, actors, doctors, etc.

Among the Jews who fully integrated into the Moldovan society, created and left their immortal creations to their descendants, there are sculptors Lazar Dubinovsky, Claudia Kobizeva and Lev Averbukh, architects Valentin Voitsekhovsky, David Palatnik and Valentin Mednek, composers David Gerschfeld, Solomon Loebel, David Fedov and Zlata Tkach, artists Moisei Gamburd and Ada Zevina, actress Ninel Kameneva, filmmakers Mikhail Izrailev, Eugeniu Vengre and Olga Ulitskaya, musical figures Maria Dailis (Braido), Lydia Babich and Gita Stratilevich, writers and playwrights Yechiel Shraibman, Liviu Deleanu and Leonid Corneanu, scientists Pavel Sovetov, Lazar Polevoy and Isaak Rafalovich, doctors Moisei Gekhtman and Dmitry Tumarkin, and many, many others.

The exhibition also presents documentary materials from the Museum of History of the Jews in the Republic of Moldova concerning the Jewish pogroms in Chişinău in 1903 and 1906; some of these testimonies were taken from the National Archives of the Republic of Moldova.

A separate compartment of the exhibition brings shocking pictures of the Holocaust and calls on the public to realize the need to know the truth about the crimes of fascism. Researchers estimate that about 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million children, became victims of the Holocaust. About 270,000 Jews died in ghettos and camps in Bessarabia and Transnistria.

This compartment reminds contemporaries that recovering the memory of Holocaust victims is a social desideratum that must be taken into account by any institution responsible for preserving historical memory.

The exhibition "Jewish Presence in the History, Culture and Memory of the Republic of Moldova" is part of the series of events planned in the Action Plan for the implementation of the Declaration of the Parliament of the Republic of Moldova on the adoption of the Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust, chaired by Elie Wiesel.

The opening of the exhibition will take place on October 12, 2021, at 15:00, in room 1 on the ground floor of the National Museum of History of Moldova, 31 August 1989 Street, 121A.