Torah animal world
Inside Torah Animal World, NYC’s Museum Filled with Taxidermy Creatures
In the Hasidic Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park, Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch runs two museums side by side on the corner of 41st Highway and 16th Avenue. Torah Animal World and the Living Torah Museum are some of the most off-the-beaten path museums in New York City you can find. In fact, the off-beat Village Voice called Torah Animal World “one of the weirdest and most glorious museums this weird and glorious city has ever seen.” These quirky museums are featured in our guidebook Secret Brooklyn.
Torah Animal World, filled with at least $1.5 million in taxidermied animals, aims to have every animal and wings mentioned in the Torah on exhibit. All the animals died naturally in zoos or gaming reserves and are shown in “true-to-life” poses. Animals on present include lions, giraffes, a zebra, a black bear, a llama on skis, a penguin, bison, fish with incredibly scary teeth and much more. There are technically separate exhibitions, organized by Rabbinic literature — animals of the Mishna, the tiny animals of the Sheratzim within the Torah, and animals mentione
All photos by Sara Maria Salamone
The first thing I noticed when I walked into Torah Animal World was the giant moose head on the front of the building. This is just one of the many strange and incongruous things I saw at this “spiritual taxidermy center” in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park, Brooklyn.
This zombified version of Noah’s Ark was built by Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch. It’s housed inside his massive brownstone apartment, a three-building-wide, 11-floor-high gonzo natural-history museum holding more than 350 stuffed fish, mammals, birds, and reptiles.
Torah Animal World is probably the only Hassid-run taxidermy museum in America, a menagerie of stuffed animals from the Bible, like rams and goats.
Strangely, there are also many animals that are definitely not in the Bible, like the mother kangaroo with joey that sits in the front bay window of the building.
As Deutsch explained to me, “The kangaroo is an example of an animal that’s not mentioned in the Torah, but it’s fascinating for kids to see the kangaroo with her baby in the pouch… so we’ll expand it if it has an educational value.”
The site, ini
If you’re still crying over the death of Cecil the Lion, well, then this next one might leave you in tears of confusion. Yes, inside a Hasidic Rabbi’s house in Brooklyn’s Borough Park is a taxidermy museum called Torah Animal World. Every animal mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud is on display. Talk about making the Bible literally come to life. There’s a saber-toothed tiger next to an Arabian oryx and a crocodile followed by the top half of a giraffe. Children visiting the museum get to hold these specimens (which is pretty evident in the photos above as they are passed around like 99 bottles of beer on the wall).
Actually there’s a reason for all this touching (which wouldn’t be allowed in most museums) as supposedly experiencing these animals up close helps unlock the Old Testament’s dense metaphors…or something. The owner, Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch, believes “if you touch history, history touches you.” It’s also very educational as visitors get to see what the original horns used for a 200-year-old curled shofar actually look like, and sound like, which apparently is quite different from the ones used today (shofar are horns that are blown on Rosh Hashanah). There is
Torah Animal World, The Most Delightfully Specific Museum In NYC, Is Quietly Preparing For A Comeback
In 2013, Gothamist reported that Torah Animal World, a taxidermy museum in Brooklyn containing hundreds of animals it says are described in the Torah, was preparing to close. At the time, Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch, the museum’s owner and founder, told the NY Post, "I tried to work through the terrible economy that we're in, but it just came to a point that we now had to make a decision to sell it.” The story was a lot more complicated, though, and Torah Animal World (and the Living Torah Museum, also housed in the building and owned by Deutsch) have managed to survive another six years. Now, he says both museums are on the verge of a major renovation and, he hopes, a comeback.
Torah Animal World is presented in several unconnected rooms inside of a rambling, multi-story house on 41st Street in Borough Park; it is open by appointment only. (A second branch of the museum in Fallsburg, New York, is open during the summer.) On a recent weekday afternoon, standing in a blue-walled room, near a surprised-looking white rhino head (“Extinct,” Deutsch notes) and a variety of other,
I was surrounded. Seven lions encircled us, mouths ajar with eternal hunger. It was me, a photographer and a rabbi. Sounds like the beginning of a bizarre, hacky joke or the kind of anxiety-ridden dream you tell your therapist about (maybe you should have just had that bat mitzvah?) or possibly even a premise for a very strange and specific horror film. Regardless, it’s the kind of scene you would never imagine happening in your real life, especially in Brooklyn.
This is Torah Animal World.
“Don’t be afraid. How about holding a baby lion?” Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch, founder and curator of Torah Animal World, attempts to comfort me with the stuffed baby lion, his face frozen in ferocious spirit. “Kids come in here, and they are in love because you feel like you’re walking into a lion’s den.”
That’s only the beginning of the fascinating journey through Rabbi Deutsch’s treasure chest of taxidermy delights and ancient artifacts of time forgotten. Torah Animal World is a subset of the Living Torah Museum (voted Best Museum of New York by the Village Voice) offers peculiar insight on an otherwise conventional history. Located in Borough Park, Brooklyn, Rabbi Deutsch has recons