29 Portrait of Leó Holländer and his wife

Eperjes, 1880’s

talbotype

Gift of Dezső and György Holländer, 1912

The photograph of Leó Holländer (Eperjes [now Presov, Slovakia], 1805 - 1887)  and his wife was a gift of their children, Dezső and György, to the Museum to treasure the memory of their parents.   The double portrait was taken of an elderly couple, at the twilight of their life, in the 1880s, by photographic procedure. The elderly couple is dressed in dated garbs. Mrs. Holländer wears a typical Jewish woman’s headdress of the biedermeier style. Holländer was of great importance for the Jewish Museum, as he was a community leader of the of Sáros county Jewry, playing an active role in the struggle for civil emancipation of the Jews. Holländer was a Hungarian patriot who served in the revolutionary army of Lajos Kossuth in 1848; later he was in charge of the economic department of the National Defense Ministry. He accepted the invitation of József Eötvös to participate in the First Jewish Congress in 1868–1869 of which he was the oldest member.