#Exhibit of the Month

Manufactured in 1902 by AG vorm Siedel & Nauman in Dresden, Germany.

Dimensions: Length - 38 cm, Width - 35 cm, Height - 20 cm. Weight - 16 kg. It entered the museum collection in 1984, transferred from the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History.

The typewriter features a standard carriage mounted on ball bearings and rollers, along with a keyboard equipped with 42 keys. These contain two complete sets of Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, punctuation marks, numbers, and mathematical symbols, enabling the typing of 126 characters. Beneath the metal casing, the type bars are arranged in a fan-like pattern, holding embossed characters and ink ribbon rollers. When the keys are pressed, the type bars strike the inked ribbon, imprinting characters onto the paper tensioned in the machine's roller system.

The side panels are elegantly decorated with refined cast-iron elements in the Art Nouveau style, displaying the brand name - "Ideal." The Polyglott model, featuring a bilingual keyboard patented in the United Kingdom by Max Klaczko from Riga, Latvia, was produced between 1902 and 1913, marking the first typewriter capable of writing in two languages. The "Ideal Polyglott" typewriter was actively sold in the Russian Empire and gained significant popularity in Poland, Bulgaria, and Serbia.
The typewriter - a mechanical device used for printing text directly onto paper - ranks among the most important inventions of the modern era, as it revolutionized communication. From the late 19th century to the early 21st century, it became an indispensable tool, widely used by writers, in offices, for business correspondence, and in private homes. The peak of typewriter sales occurred in the 1950s when the average annual sales in the United States reached 12 million units. In November 2012, the British Brother factory produced what it claimed to be the last typewriter, which was donated to the Science Museum in London.
The advent of computers, word processing software, printers, and the decreasing cost of these technologies led to the typewriter's disappearance from the mainstream market, turning it into a museum exhibit.
June 23 marks Typewriter Day, commemorating the date when American journalist and inventor Christopher Latham Sholes patented his typewriter. This day celebrates the simple yet revolutionary device that has become history, as well as the remarkable literary achievements it has enabled since 1868.

Virtual Tour

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.