One of the men who came to the conference, and with whom we are now working, is Petr Brod, a journalist known from Free Europe and BBC broadcasts.
And it was he who suggested the name of our museum, which we liked and started to use: Mehrin (מעהרין).
Daniel Soukup from the Olomouc Department of Judaic Studies says what Mehrin means for a change: It is the historical name of Moravia in Hebrew, which is based on the German Mähren. The name Medinat Mehrin (Land of Moravia – מדינת מעהרין) was sometimes used in medieval monuments. In the early modern period, Hebrew writers sometimes played with this word in liturgical texts, associating it with the Hebrew mar, meaning bitter, referring to the bitter fate of the Jews in Moravia, especially during the Swedish invasion in the 1740s.
MEHRIN is thus Moravia, as the Jews themselves have always referred to it.
In order to make the name of what we are building understandable even to those who do not speak Hebrew, we have expanded it a bit: Mehrin – the Moravian Jewish Museum.
We also adapted our universal logo, for which we thank Vít Rýznar once again.
