Lions and tigers and bears — oy vey!
The city’s weirdest museum will soon be closing its doors and making an exodus from Brooklyn with a menagerie of 350 stuffed animals in tow.
Beset by financial woes, officials at Torah Animal World — which boasts every animal mentioned in the first five books of the Old Testament — said there’s no choice but to hoof it out of Borough Park.
“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,” said Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch, who owns and operates the museum.
So time is running out to see a taxidermied ibex, (not kosher) peacock (kosher) and giraffe (kosher) — to name just a few.
“All the animals died naturally, either in zoos or gaming reserves,” Deutsch, 47, said. “We don’t kill any animals for our exhibits.”
He valued the entire collection at about $1.5 million and said many of the animals were donated but others he’s had to pay for, including a $40,000 elephant head. “We accumulated a lot of debt doing this,” said.
The museum, which opened in 2008, operates out of a private home that hit the market last week for $995,000, Deutsch said.
Visits are by appointment only, and the museum, which charges $10 per person, is still accepting reservations.
“A kid who is learning in school can come here and, in an hour, get to see the animals of the bible. Get to see the birds of the bible. He can see the creepy animals of the bible,” Deutsch said. “This is the only place for them to go and see the animals in a biblical context.”
But one critter the 35,000 annual visitors have never seen is the very unkosher pig.
“Some people are disgusted by looking at pigs,” Deutsch told The Post, who said he didn’t want to give people a “reason not to come.”
“You know, a bakery sells not what the baker likes, but what the customers want to eat. And in a certain sense, you have to be sensitive to what people want to see or not want to see.”
Deutsch said he doesn’t want to sell the two-bedroom home — which has a moosehead hanging outside near a second story window — and is still holding out hope for a miracle.
“If a sponsor came along and helped us, we would not sell,” he admitted.
But doing a mitzvah won’t come cheap. “We’ll need a million dollars,” he noted.
Deutsch leads a synagogue, operates a food pantry and The Living Torah Museum, a treasure trove of artifacts from Jewish history, next door.
The animals will be moved to another museum branch Deutsch runs in the Catskills.