Currently on display at the St. Louis Art Museum is an 18th-century Italian Torah Ark Curtain (Parokhet). Produced by a young teenage Jewish girl, Simhah Viterbo, this parokhet, described as a “tour de force of needlework and rich metallic embroidery on a shimmering azure-blue silk ground.” Embroidered with her name and the date (1754-1755), it is the centerpiece for an exhibition which brings together a selection of devotional textiles used in Jewish, Christian and Muslim contexts as well as highly fashionable secular textiles made in or imported to Europe. Purchased in 2018, the parokhet was previously on long-term loan to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The exhibition is further enhanced by examples of rare Jewish books which help to further contextualize the parokhet. Come join Genny Cortinovis, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator of Decorative Arts and Design at the St. Louis Art Museum, who curated the exhibition, and Bill Sitzer, a Docent at the Art Museum and Regional Director of the National Docent

Symposium Council, as they talk about this exhibition and reflect on its artistic and Judaic contexts.

To register for this free, online Mirowitz Center program, visit http://bit.ly/Mirowitz-registration, call 314-733-9813 or email [email protected].