Brent Museum
Brent Museum
Formerly the Grange Museum of Community History, Brent Museum has a collection consisting of objects relating to the local Brent area and the communities who live there.
The museum encourages all people from the many diverse communities in Brent to donate a part of their history, either through objects or oral history, to ensure that they make their mark and history known to future generations.
Collection details
Costume and Textiles, Decorative and Applied Art, Land Transport, Social History
Jewish
The best material consists of a couple of donations of objects, photographs and documents relating to Austrian-Jewish refugees from the Nazis. These are the Martha Berdach group (donated by Mark Cummins, a former mayor of Brent and a neighbour of Martha Berdach [later Mayerson]) and the Alice Schick (later Bacher) collection, donated by Michelle Gluck. Both collections are somewhat similar. Their great strength is photographs of people in pre-1938 Austro-Hungary and Austria, the Berdach group being stronger on the pre-1918 period and the Schick group being stronger on the inter-war period. The Berdach group also has photographs taken by a refugee just after arriving in Britain. The documentation is interesting too.
Other Jewish material is limited to packaging for Kosher food and religious objects, and a modern (1998) railway ticket from Katowice to Oœwiêcim (Auschwitz) brought back from Poland by a member of the museum staff