The Jewish Museum in Prague was established in 1906, and abolished in the autumn of 1939 following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Its collection was taken over by the Prague Jewish community in 1942 as the Central Jewish Museum based on Karel Stein’s initiative, becoming a safe shelter for liturgical objects, books and archival documents from the defunct Jewish communities until the end of World War II. Today, the Jewish Museum in Prague is one of the oldest Jewish museums in Europe.