JUNE
Artifact of the Month: June 2018
Tefillin
Tefillin
Harry Koritzinsky (1900 - 1989)
Harry Meier Koritzinsky was born in Kristiania as one of 6 children to Ragnhild (b. Nissalowitz) and Ruben Koritzinsky. Harry was a Military Academy graduate (1919-21) and later Law graduate (1924). In 1926 he married Ruth Dolowitz (born 1905 in Helsingborg). They had a daughter in 1931. Harry later became holder of the company A.J. Koritzinsky & Co., a watchmaker firm in Oslo. During the war he fled with his family to Sweden, where he eventually became head of the Refugee Office in Stockholm.
Harry Koritzinsky also devoted much of his adult life to Jewish history, religion and culture in Norway. In 1922 he published the book Jewish history in Norway, and also summarized his own family in the Genealogical Register of the Families Lapidus, Nissalowitz and Schwartzman, which he published in 1946. That same year he became the head of the Mosaic Confederation in Oslo, a presidency he kept for almost 30 years, til he retired in 1975.
Photo: Harry Koritzinsky, Stockholm June 1945
A tefillin is a set of small black leather boxes containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah. This tefillin has belonged to Harry Koritzinsky and is a gift to the Oslo Jewish Museum from Bjørn Tandberg.