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Curator Simona Di Nepi leads a two-part, in-depth virtual tour of one of the very first Judaica galleries in an encyclopedic art museum in the world. Explore the 27 works on view and the stories behind their recent acquisition (or unearthing): from an Italian Renaissance Torah binder and an Iraqi Torah case used in India, to a Yemenite woman’s festive headdress and a Torah Ark from 1920s Chelsea, Massachusetts. Spanning five hundred years and four continents, and featuring, silver, textiles, furniture, paintings, and books, these works highlight the extraordinary diversity of Jewish culture.
Simona Di Nepi is the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Curator of Judaica at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she is responsible for building and displaying the Judaica collection, and for curating Intentional Beauty: Jewish Ritual Art from the Collection, the museum’s first Judaica gallery. Originally from Rome, before moving to the United States Simona studied and worked in London and Tel Aviv for 25 years. She filled curatorial roles-in both decorative arts and Old Masters-at the Victoria and Albert Museum, The National Gallery, and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, where she cared for permanent collections and curated exhibitions. In Israel, she worked as curator at ‘Anu: The Museum of the Jewish People’ and as Lecturer in Italian Renaissance art at Reichman University, Herzelyia. Simona curated the exhibitions and wrote the accompanying catalogues for Reunions: Bringing Early Italians Paintings Back Together (The National Gallery, London, 2005), and Dreyfus: The Story of a French-Jewish Family (Anu: the Museum of the Jewish People, Tel Aviv, 2014). She is also the author of the National Gallery’s collection catalogue From Duccio to Leonardo: Renaissance Painting 1250-1500. In Judaica, Simona wrote the essays ‘Itinerant Sephardic Judaica: from Dutch Ports to the Harbours of Europe and the Americas’, ‘Jewish Things at the Museum of Fine Arts: a History’, ‘The Servi Shaddai: the Family History of an amulet at the MFA Boston’, and ‘Treasures from storage: Two Rediscovered Italian Jewish Textiles.’