Obj. ID: 39237
Sacred and Ritual Objects  Tefillin bag, Westheim bei Hammelburg, circa 1800

The following description was prepared by William Gross:     

This delicately printed cotton Tefilin bag was retrieved in 1985 from Westheim, among the material removed and abandoned from the geniza of a former synagogue in that town. The building had been sold and coverted into a home more than one hundred years ago and was undergoing a rennovation when the geniza was uncovered. The large amount of remains were removed and thrown away. Luckily, before most of the material was taken to the dump, Professor Falk Wieseman of Heinrich Heine University in Stuttgart was informed of the existence of the material and rushed to save the most important elements of what remained. This paisley print cloth bag was among the rescued objects. Considerng the current Orthodox attitude toward such brightly decorated objects, it is revealing about the customs among the no less Orthodox Jews of southern Germany some two hundred years ago. Such bags were generally made for the Bar Mitzvah child for his first pair of Tefilin.