Above: A tour group at the Torah Animal World site in Brooklyn. Via the Torah Animal World website.
Brooklyn-based Torah Animal World, a taxidermy "zoo" featuring animals that appear in the Old Testament, is leaving its home in a Borough Park townhouse for financial reasons and is moving to the Catskills, according to a slew of reports in NYC press.
Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch, who runs the museum, plans to move most of the collection to a satellite location in South Fallsburg.
It's going to be quite a move. The Brooklyn location features 350 stuffed animals, including more than 30 kinds of kosher birds, a diorama of a bear catching a deer, a giraffe and an elephant.
In 2010, The Brooklyn Ink visited the musem:
What should be the living room of 1605 41st St. is crowded with a lion, a bear, the top half of a giraffe, a cow and many more four-legged creatures, plus a few extra legs, which have been converted into stools. Upstairs are the birds and reptiles, and in a sunken room at the rear of the first floor are several animals described in the Perek Shira, an ancient Jewish text about the natural world—including an enormous elephant’s head, ears and trunk fully extended.
More:
Seeking a Buyer for a Home Full of Creatures From the Time of Noah, New York Times
This $1 Million Brooklyn House Is Filled With Dead Animals, Curbed
Brooklyn Torah Animal World flat broke, will close, NY Post
The Torah’s Animals Inhabit a Borough Park Museum, The Brooklyn Ink
Brooklyn's Torah Animal World Consolidating Animal Collection, Vos Iz Neias?
Bankrupt biblical 'zoo' moving stuffed animals to Catskills, Haaretz
