Hanno Loewy, the director of the Jewish Museum in Hohenems, Austria, is the new president of the Association of European Jewish Museums.

Representatives from 45 Jewish museums located in countries across Europe -- from Spain to Turkey -- elected Loewy to the post at the museum association's annual meeting in London in late November.

Loewy succeeds Ricki Burman of the London Jewish Museum, which hosted this year's meeting. Delegates discussed the future of Jewish museums, new approaches to educational work in the multicultural immigrant community and a number of joint projects.

On 19-22 November 2011, the Jewish Museum London hosted the annual conference of the Association of European Jewish Museums (AEJM).  Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett served as keynote speaker on the opening day of the AEJM conference. Follow this link to an audio recording of BKG's lecture, ‘Why do Jewish Museums Matter? An International Perspective'.

Barbara, who served as CAJM keynote in 2002, is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. She is currently Program Director for the Core Exhibition for the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which is located on the site of the former Warsaw Ghetto. Her books include Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864-1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki), They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust, which she coauthored with her father Mayer Kirshenblatt, and Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage.

Jewish Museum Picks Director From Art World

One day in the early 1990s, Barry Ragone, a Miami Beach dentist, spotted a wood panel in an auction-house storeroom in Fort Lauderdale. It had Hebrew writing on it, and it looked old. He bought it for $37.50. After years of research, Ragone discovered that it was a lot older than he'd thought—a thousand years old, give or take. According to experts in medieval Jewish art, it was originally the door to a Torah ark in Cairo's Ben Ezra synagogue, where Maimonides prayed and the Geniza was housed.

At first, Ragone wanted the door to be in a Jewish institution. But after speaking with Gary Vikan, director of Baltimore's Walters Art Museum, he changed his mind. He liked Vikan's concept of a medieval-art gallery where Christian, Jewish, and Islamic art are commingled, showing how the cultures overlapped. And he liked the idea of a portal linking the Jewish community to the museum. For a sum that was less than half of the $1 million he believed the panel to be worth, he partially sold, partially donated it to the Walters, which acquired it in partnership with Yeshiva University Museum. The object will be featured in a show about Jewish life in medieval Egypt opening at the Walters in fall 2012 and later traveling to YUM. In 2013, the Walters has scheduled "Treasures of Jewish Silversmiths from Yemen," spotlighting another recent gift, from Benjamin Zucker and Derek Content.  

Hanukkah lamp, Augsburg, Germany, circa 1750.  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

That a mainstream art museum would showcase Jewish ritual objects is rare but not unheard of—the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Royal Ontario Museum all maintain Judaica galleries conceived and funded by donors. What is new is that so-called encyclopedic museums are starting to integrate major Jewish ceremonial objects into their collections, exhibitions, and programming. In the newly opened Art of the Americas Wing at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, Torah finials by colonial silversmith Myer Myers (on loan from the historic Touro Synagogue) stand proudly amid Newport furniture. This spring, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is exhibiting the Library of Congress' 1478 Washington Haggadah. The Detroit Art Institute, meanwhile, is looking to borrow Jewish items for its Islamic Art galleries, having recently returned three Judeo-Persian manuscripts to the Jewish Theological Seminary.

"One of the real strengths of this trend is the recognition of Jewish artifacts as high-class works of art that belong in high-class established art museums," said Gabriel Goldstein, associate director for exhibitions and programs at YUM. "It shows we're part of the canon." But enhanced connoisseurship is only one factor inspiring museums to court collectors, rush to make strategic alliances with Jewish institutions, and scour storerooms, auction catalogs, and local living rooms for Jewish ritual objects to display. Another is the desire to make collections truly multicultural. And then of course there is the untapped pool of potential donors and supporters who have largely focused on Jewish institutions.

That's what the MFA discovered when it bought a spectacular silver gilt menorah from Augsburg, Germany (now on view in its 18th-century European-art galleries), for about half a million dollars at Sotheby's in 2009, using individual donations from dozens of supporters. Shortly afterward, director Malcolm Rogers received some unexpected news: A woman neither he nor his staff had ever heard of, Jetskalina Phillips, left the MFA a seven-figure bequest to support the acquisition, study, and display of Judaica. (Phillips, it turned out, was a retired elementary-school educator in Kansas, who had converted to Judaism under the tutelage of a Boston rabbi.)

The museum will have to be strategic in deploying the gift, Rogers acknowledged. Its collection of Judaica is, as he diplomatically put it, "underdeveloped." While the MFA, like most encyclopedic museums in this country, showcases the artistic achievements of world cultures, it hasn't made much of an effort to collect, study, or showcase Jewish ceremonial art. "It's not been seen as an essential part of the museum's mission to diverse communities," Rogers said. But he's well aware that purchase funds alone can't conjure a respectable Judaica collection from the MFA's current holdings, which include a shofar, a Torah binder, and a kiddush cup. "Get the message out," he urged. "We would love to work with collectors."

In a field plagued by scarcity, fakes, and provenance issues, many experts question whether it's possible to create a substantial Judaica collection even if money is no object. "It's a challenge, but it's doable," said philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, speaking from experience. About five years ago, he went to Philippe de Montebello, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and offered to help create a department of Judaica with a permanent exhibition space. "The answer was a flat no," Steinhardt said. (Via Harold Holzer, the Met's senior vice president for external affairs, de Montebello confirmed that discussions took place but never resulted in a plan.)

As many Jewish scholars ruefully point out, mainstream museums are moving into a void left by culturally specific museums. Some, like the Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago, have downsized exhibitions and public programming. The collection of the Judah L. Magnes Museum was transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, which is planning to open an exhibition space this fall. Jewish art museums have come to focus on crowd-pleasing modern and contemporary art exhibitions, or on community programming. "There's growth on one side where there's a little stepping back on the other," said Grace Cohen Grossman, senior curator at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, who worked on a comprehensive study of the Smithsonian's Judaica holdings in 1997. "I can't afford to buy the pieces that North Carolina does."

"Basically Jewish museums are lazy," said Tom Freudenheim, who ran Berlin's Jewish Museum and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, among other institutions. "Isn't it ironic that the places that have real riches don't do a lot with them?"

Goldstein has a more philosophical approach. "Maybe the Jewish museums had to be there to say Judaica mattered at an artistic level," he said. In addition to working with the Walters, Goldstein has advised the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, which has two Jewish microcollections: Judaica donated by Dr. Fred Weinberg and Joy Cherry Weinberg, a local couple, in the European galleries; and in the Asian Galleries, 11 objects related to the Jewish community of Kaifeng, China, acquired by Bishop William Charles White in the 1920s.

Goldstein has also worked with the North Carolina Museum of Art, whose Judaica gallery, resplendently installed in the museum's recent expansion, was founded in 1983 by Abram Kanof, a former president of New York's Jewish Museum. Supervised by John Coffey, the museum's deputy director for art and curator of American and modern art, it features a multicultural range of Judaica including an Ottoman Empire Megillah, a Chinese Torah case, and a Bohemian silver Torah shield. Last March, the museum acquired a set of late-18th-century Torah silver made in London for the Orthodox Synagogue of Plymouth. "Quite frankly it really almost stands alone as a boutique selection of beautiful objects," said the museum's director, Lawrence Wheeler.

Nevertheless, like other directors I spoke to, Wheeler stressed the educational benefits of adding the Judeo to their Judeo-Christian storyline. "Our collection is driven by so much Christian subject matter; it's heavily into Renaissance 16th- and 17th-century painting," he said. "To have another perspective on celebrating faith is interesting to people." Similarly, Kaywin Feldman, director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, stresses that her Judaica gallery, started by a local couple, Harold and Mickey Smith, is on gallery tours devoted to the religions of the world.

The result of offers that perhaps couldn't really be refused, Judaica departments at mainstream museums inevitably land in the portfolio of curators with little or no expertise in Jewish art or religion. That was the case of Corine Wegener, a curator of American and European decorative art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. To get up to speed, she signed up for a program at the Jewish Theological Seminary, offered in 2004, 2006, and 2007, that she called "Judaica for dummies."

Vivian B. Mann, director of the master's program in Jewish art at the seminary, conceived the program, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, for curators at museums like the Met and the Getty as well as smaller Jewish and secular institutions. "They had the pieces, but they didn't understand them," she said. "We helped to develop the context of use and meaning and how they could be integrated with other treasure arts." She uses the term "treasure arts" rather than decorative arts, she explained, because the latter "is now considered to be a pejorative term for this area of study when compared to the 'higher' arts of architecture, painting, and sculpture."

Mann, former chair of Judaica at the Jewish Museum, is strongly in favor of integrating Judaica into permanent-collection galleries rather than isolating it in its own space. Since there are few restrictions on the forms of ceremonial art in Jewish law, Mann said, Judaica reflects the styles of the surrounding culture. That is especially the case in Islamic cultures, she said, where through the mid-20th century, Jews were "an integral part of the artist class."

Melanie Holcomb and Barbara Drake Boehm, curators in the Met's medieval department, attended Mann's program in 2006. Since then they have worked extensively with the Jewish Theological Seminary, as well as other institutions, to arrange loans of objects such as the Haggadah currently on view at the Met. "We're interested in the way Jewish art is integrated in a broader context, the way it interacts with other artistic traditions that surround it," says Holcomb. "That's been our angle."

At the MFA in Boston, Marietta Cambareri, curator of decorative arts and sculpture, has added "Jetskalina H. Phillips Curator of Judaica" to her title. When we spoke, she was on her way to Phillips' congregation, Temple Israel, to learn more about the mysterious donor, part of a crash course to bring herself up to speed on Jewish art, religion, scholarship, and collectors. Often she is targeting her own colleagues: "I work with every department that might work with Judaica—and that is pretty much every collection in the museum," she said.

A team from the Columbus Museum of Art recently toured North Carolina's Judaica gallery as it considers whether and how to create its  own Jewish art program. While the Columbus museum has received several gifts of Judaica in recent years—among them Allan Wexler's Gardening Sukkah—executive director Nannette Maciejunes said that the impetus is a desire to re-contextualize the museum's 20th-century holdings. "We have a great collection of American modernism," she said. "I joke that it's the best art of white gentile guys."

Two recent acquisitions got her wondering how to build on that base. One was a group of images by 70 members of the Photo League, a New York organization of photographers devoted to social change; the other was the Philip J. and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art, 1930–1970, which includes work by many Eastern European Jewish artists. "I started thinking, is there a way of looking at the collection through a lens that talks about Jewish life," she said. The museum has invited YUM's Goldstein to Columbus in the fall for an "Antiques Road Show"-style event to see what else might be in local private collections. "We're on an exploratory road," she said. "It's a journey to see what's possible."

Robin Cembalest is executive editor of ARTnews. She blogs at www.letmypeopleshow.com.

SKOKIE, Ill. — Before the $45 million Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center opened here two years ago, there was some urgency in completing its 65,000-square-foot building, which now stands so incongruously monumental in the midst of Chicago's suburban landscape. At one time, 7,000 Jews bearing the scars of the Holocaust had lived in Skokie with their families, and they were aging. Many had contributed artifacts to the museum; some participated when it was just a storefront on Main Street; some had their oral histories recorded for its exhibition and their lives chronicled in the institution's imposing companion book, "Memory and Legacy."

And though they had survived one of history's greatest scourges, many, as we are reminded by the closing years of their biographies, did not live to see this project completed.

That is a shame, because although the museum has its flaws — some of which are shared by others of the 16 major Holocaust museums in the United States — it is an impressive achievement, its permanent historical exhibition surveying Germany's descent from high civilization to Nazi inferno, as it obsessively dragged Europe's Jews to their deaths in ditches and crematoriums.

Like the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, which opened last fall, it will also most likely be among the last such institutions created by survivors of the cataclysm, bearing witness and offering lessons. That participation is one of the sources of strength of such museums, but strangely too, it is also a source of weakness.

In its history, in fact, this museum encapsulates one aspect of the evolution of such institutions. Refugees from horrors have always tended to congregate in particular communities, not to keep their memories alive, but paradoxically, to allow them to be forgotten; the past would become an aspect of shared experiences that did not need mentioning and would not spur curiosity. And judging from some of the videotaped recollections at the museum in Skokie, where in the mid-1970s almost half the population was Jewish, and a good portion of that was made up of survivors, that is what happened — at least until 1976, when the National Socialist Party of America first sought permission to parade through the town's streets.

Ultimately, after court challenges and demonstrations, the plans of this Nazi-inspired group were changed, and scarcely two dozen acolytes gathered to demonstrate in Chicago. But as a concluding gallery in this museum shows, the controversy galvanized the community of survivors and reawakened old vulnerabilities. Artifacts and memories were contributed for the creation of a small museum, which opened in 1984. A speakers' bureau of survivors was established to share experiences. And lobbying began, to include the Holocaust in Illinois public school curriculums (a requirement eventually established by the state legislature in 1990). This museum (which contains a permanent exhibition, along with art shows, an auditorium and a children's display) is the climax of that community's efforts, where 150,000 visitors a year are welcomed.

And all through the main exhibition — designed by David Layman, with two historical consultants, Michael Berenbaum and Yitzchak Mais — the survivors' artifacts, biographies and interviews amplify the historical archive. There are sketchbooks and scrapbooks, uniforms and relics. Two Yiddish diaries here were written by Aron Derman while he fought as a partisan in the Polish forests. There is a bra scavenged from stolen thread and cloth by Hannah Messinger in a German labor camp, and a leather belt that Samuel Harris — the museum's president, who was imprisoned in Nazi camps from ages 4 through 12 — had kept with him as his sole comfort.

The museum is also displaying a German rail car, refurbished in 1943, the type used to transport Jews east to the camps. The exhibition's historical films were created by Northern Light Productions.

The building, designed by the architect Stanley Tigerman, leaves its industrial skeleton exposed, so that nothing is made artificially pretty. And as the visitor weaves through the jagged, twisting galleries, the particularity of the personal objects becomes powerful. It would be helpful to get a better sense of how specific survivors' lives unfolded — their stories emerge only in fragments along the way — but the companion book incorporates additional details. Some atmospheric galleries are surprisingly effective, and it ultimately seems appropriate that Nazi memorabilia is shown through transparent floor panels over which we walk as we reach the postwar period.

But the survivors' perspectives can also be a weakness. The concluding gallery gives too much emphasis to the effects of the planned National Socialist Party march in Skokie — effects that will be of little importance in future decades.

And because the survivors' experiences are necessarily personal, the message of these museums also takes on a particular shape. Survivors knew their neighbors in the pre-Holocaust world. Often they were part of a wider community, leading ordinary and sometimes prosperous lives. As their world was dismantled, they had to ask, again and again, how friends and neighbors allowed this to happen. They imagined what it might have been like, had there been rebellion or resistance. And in drawing lessons from their experiences, some began to see the Holocaust as an extreme manifestation of a refusal to care about injustice or the fate of one's neighbor.

Their approach was amplified by others who wished to avoid making the Holocaust seem too particular, emphasizing instead more general humanitarian issues. The lesson, most broadly, and most blandly, is that those who learn from the Holocaust must learn the importance of empathy and take a stand against injustice.

Become an "upstander," the museum urges, not a "bystander." A concluding 10-minute film, narrated by Barbra Streisand, is a call for social action. "Now it's up to you" is its repeated moral. We are reminded of the prevalence of genocides, which, despite the cry of "Never Again!," show how much still needs to be done.

The museum also presents a special exhibition for children, which, its literature explains, “provides a safe space where they can brainstorm strategies on how to speak up for those experiencing hatred, prejudice and discrimination through bullying and acts of intolerance within their local and global communities.”

Participatory videos urge children to “take a stand against intolerance and inequality.” One such video, which dramatizes schoolyard bullying, challenges the child to select a course of action: “Say something now to the bully,” “Show my support to the person,” “Go tell the adult nearby” or “Something else.”

This approach is also used to justify the inclusion of the Holocaust in school curriculums. And it is strange. We wouldn’t expect a museum about World War II to end with lessons about the evils of all wars. We wouldn’t expect an examination of American slavery to end with platitudes about the many despicable ways people treat others as objects. Why then here? Why the reluctance to study history in its context instead of diluting it with generalities and vague analogies? This path also ends up encouraging those always ready to invoke wild comparisons to Nazism and the Holocaust.

None of this undermines the sheer force of the chronicle to which we have been exposed, but by making the overall perspectives so personal — and this institution is not alone — the museum may also prevent us from fully understanding other aspects of the history. If we want to find a lesson in the events, for example, is it that individuals should not be bystanders or that nations should not be appeasers? Is the lesson that everybody should have a social conscience, or that a different kind of political action is needed when such forces emerge? Was the Holocaust a product of intolerance or an expression of more specific archetypal hatreds?

One of the challenges faced by Holocaust museums as survivors die is to understand their experience by seeing it through more than their eyes, to examine the past without homogenizing it with platitudes, to offer history without homily.

The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is at 9603 Woods Drive, Skokie; (847) 967-4800, ilholocaustmuseum.org.

LOS ANGELES — Is the Holocaust too much with us? Or if not the Holocaust, then Holocaust museums?

It can sometimes seem so. The Association of Holocaust Organizations has 293 institutional members around the world, each at least partly devoted to commemoration. The association counts 16 major Holocaust museums in the United States, in Richmond, Houston, New York, Washington and other cities to which Jewish survivors immigrated after World War II. And they are still being built. Two years ago the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center opened near Chicago. And last fall the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust opened here in a new $15.5 million building. It is actually the city's second such museum; the other, the Museum of Tolerance, examines the Holocaust's connection to its main theme and welcomes 350,000 visitors a year.

But the answer to these questions is not easy for it seems that while almost all these institutions have developed out of the desires of survivors to offer testimony, command remembrance, educate the young and ensure that nothing similar occurs, at the same time exaggerated and wrong-headed Holocaust and Nazi analogies have proliferated at an even greater rate than the museums themselves. It is as if familiarity is breeding analogy, and analogy is unaffected by how many institutions meticulously survey the horrors of calculated, systematic murder on a mass scale.

The new museum here, in Pan Pacific Park, not far from the traditionally Jewish district of Fairfax Avenue, should not, of course, bear the brunt of these broodings. It does, however, in its successes and failures, indicate some of the challenges that will face Holocaust museums when there are no longer any remaining survivors and they commemorate a receding historical trauma.

The Holocaust museum here is a strange hybrid, for not only is it the country's newest, it is also, its literature asserts, the oldest, tracing its origins to 1961, when a group of survivors studying English as a Second Language at Hollywood High School decided it would be important to display some of the objects that had survived with them and that might, in a museum setting, bear witness.

The museum was supported by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles until 2005. But it lost its Wilshire Boulevard home after a 1994 earthquake and found itself wandering from one place to another, its primacy eclipsed by the Museum of Tolerance and its future in doubt. It was able to lease the current site from the city, but it is unlikely the museum could have been built without the assistance of the Los Angeles lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg (who is the grandson of two Viennese Jewish composers: Arnold Schoenberg and Eric Zeisl).

Mr. Schoenberg was the lawyer for Maria V. Altmann, who challenged the Austrian government by asserting her claim to Gustav Klimt paintings stolen by the Nazis. After Mr. Schoenberg triumphed in that case in 2006, he and his wife, Pamela, donated more than $7 million to the museum. He became its president, helped shaped its displays and even wrote some of the exhibition text. Under the museum's executive director, Mark A. Rothman, the board has raised almost all of the $20 million the institution sought as its endowment.

The 32,000-square-foot building, designed by Belzberg Architects, is radically self-effacing and, in a city designed for cars, weirdly easy to miss while driving past. It bears no evident symbols of its subject and is largely subterranean. Its entrance on one end elides into the park's play areas and a 1991 Holocaust memorial; on the other side, the entrance is a corridor slicing through its low grass-topped roof. As required by the city, the building hardly intrudes on the park. The problem is that this also puts out of sight the very thing the museum is supposed to bring to notice.

Like many Holocaust museums this one tries to approach its subject with a local perspective. Many of its artifacts and the people it discusses have some connection to the Los Angeles area. That is often fascinating, because many important scholars and artists from Germany and Austria came to Southern California, which is why Herbert Marcuse gets a mention here, along with Carl Laemmle, a founder of Universal Pictures.

Along the museum's main corridor are chronicles of the Holocaust told using the front pages of local newspapers. One of the earliest, from The Los Angeles Times in 1933, reports that Secretary of State Cordell Hull had reassured Jewish leaders that while there was "considerable physical mistreatment of Jews" in Nazi Germany, "government leaders had taken action resulting in termination of the outrages."

There is also a tabletop touch screen called a Memory Pool, on which photographs of Jews in prewar Europe seem to float. Touch them and you learn more, say, about Gabor Weisz's restaurant in Fot, Hungary, or about other once-anonymous individuals, the images contributed by families or drawn from a centralized European database.

An iPod Touch is provided for each visitor (with admission, which is free). Each artifact is numbered; key in the number, and audio commentary, ranging from the cursory to the encyclopedic, can be heard. So can Nazi songs, recordings of prayers made in postwar displaced-persons camps, diary entries by ghetto inhabitants and poems from the period.

In the museum's most intense gallery there are 18 touch screens, each giving information about a death camp, along with video interviews with survivors. On a monitor, a survivor of Sobibor, in Poland, Thomas Blatt, points to a wooden model of the camp he constructed from memory, showing how an escape was planned. Before us, on display, is that very model.

Artifacts on loan from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland require no commentary: a battered shoe, a worn suitcase, an enameled child's cup. And a special exhibition also shows remarkable comic and sardonic drawings acquired by the museum, secretly sketched by Erich Lichtblau-Leskly while he was imprisoned at Theresienstadt.

The material here is so extensive and the subject so important that it might seem perverse to complain. Nevertheless, too much of the exhibition is still unfocused, and its overall purpose is not clearly defined. Some problems are organizational. The story is chronologically told, and each gallery is lined with backlighted black-and-white photos. But within galleries, the order can be haphazard. Examples of books burned by the Nazis are interrupted by displays of Nazi uniforms and Nazi political cartoons. Many displays are almost miscellaneous gatherings of objects. Some audio entries need to be drastically cut. Others do not correspond to anything on view. And artifacts lack identifying labels; they only have audio-tour numbers, so without listening you don't know what you are seeing. (A decision has recently been made to provide labels, which will be a great help.)

In a gallery describing European ghettos, why is a panel devoted to United States wartime internment camps for Japanese-Americans? Is an argument being made about similarities? If so, important differences also need to be analyzed. And near the Sobibor model we read about genocide in general, and about Darfur, Rwanda, Cambodia and Armenia. But if the museum's purpose was to explore genocide, it would have to be done in far greater detail; these cursory accounts seem to challenge the uniqueness of what we are seeing, even as the museum has gone out of its way to emphasize it. The approach asserts equivalence without really showing it.

These moments illuminate why the impact of Holocaust museums has been so qualified; many seem to feel obligated, given their claims on wider public interest, educational grants and class attention, to generalize beyond the particulars, as if simply recounting history would seem overly parochial. And thus they set the stage for poor analogies being made every day.

But as survivors die and the history grows distant, how can such institutions evolve? They have to present a different context for this awful history. What about getting more particular rather than more general?

As a Los Angeles museum, for example, this institution might strengthen its local focus and tell the history of the Holocaust as a story with regional implications for Southern California. It might follow local reactions to the Holocaust, trace the lives and families of survivors and émigrés, and expand the intriguing examples it already provides.

For example there is a haunting panel here about Dina Gottlieb Babbitt, who, as an 18-year-old art student in Prague, was deported to Theresienstadt and then to Auschwitz. She comforted the children at Auschwitz by drawing pictures from the film "Snow White" on the barracks walls. They were seen by Dr. Josef Mengele, who was so impressed he ordered her to draw pictures of Gypsies before he experimented on them.

She used her talents to barter for the lives of inmates, including her mother. She survived, we learn, moved to Los Angeles and married Art Babbitt, an animator who had, by coincidence, worked on the same movie whose images she drew at Auschwitz. Years later she tried to get back the drawings she made for Mengele from the Auschwitz museum. The request was denied.

Read this and you get a vivid sense of the Holocaust not as a genocidal abstraction but as a fearsome conglomeration of particular evils, whose shadow can still be felt, even here.

The state and stature of American Jewish museums was "Exhibit A" last week at the annual conference of the institutions' directors and programmers, held at the spanking new National Museum of American Jewish History. Gathered at the museum on Independence Mall -- with tours and side trips to such nearby sites as the Constitution Center and Temple Judea Museum at Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park -- more than 200 delegates of the Council of American Jewish Museums delved into such topics as curating and collecting, as well as the "strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats" facing the institutions.

With "no tech to high tech" part of this specialized social network's new jargon and digital storytelling having its own tale to tell, the delegates pondered people-to-people interactions as well, looking into, as one session called it, "strategies for museum/community collaboration."

Attracting speakers offering numerous solutions to new problems while also questioning solutions used in the past that may no longer be viable, the three-day conference showcased both the glittery edge of collecting and displaying, as well as the nitty-gritty of exhibiting ("Teaching, Training and Interpreting").

Money Matters

The economy has clearly had its effect on the museum world. A sampling of delegates from around the nation revealed a shared resolve and a comfort knowing that colleagues are in the same boat, whether that boat is kept afloat financially or sinking slowly into Titanic status.

"We are not doing as many special projects, but we're surviving," said David Farris, executive director of Beth Ahabah Museum and Archives of Richmond, Va., which tells the story of his local community.

"We went through a tough time, but we're living off" what's in the coffers, said Martha Sivertson, director of volunteers at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage in Beechwood, Ohio.

Arielle Weininger of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie welcomed the chance to meet and greet colleagues and exchange ideas. Of course, that meant talking to others whose provenance is the Holocaust and seeing how they deal with the prospect of "survivors dying."

Fraidy Aber of the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, opened in 2008, wanted to see how others approach the topic of "reaching out to both Jewish and non-Jewish" audiences in museum markets that face increasing competition.

The setting afforded many a context to perpetuate areas of history covered by their museums.

"It's exciting to feel that you're walking in the footsteps of history," Weininger said of the National Museum's Independence Mall location.

Deanne Kapnik, director of special events for the Mizel Museum in Denver -- a source of information about "Jewish Colorado," as well as national aspects of Jewish life and the Holocaust -- said she was gratified by sharing conference time with others.

"Being a cultural museum in a little pond," she said, it was nice to find that the water is fine in Philadelphia and elsewhere.

(Not that everything is blissful with big-city museums; many, based on talks with delegates, are faced with competition for foot traffic, and can be squeezed while seeking funds and donors.)

At least one visitor offered a different accent on the proceedings: Bernhard Purin, director of the Jewish Museum in Munich, found his U.S.counterparts accommodating in explaining how they deal with what turns out to be familiar problems.

Whether from America or Europe, he said, "we have similar issues to deal with, whether they be collections" or fluctuations in the global economy.

The JMABC joins a variety of other organizations located at the Peretz Centre including Ahavat Olam Synagogue, Bravo Dance, Independent Jewish Voices, Jewish Food Bank storage and distribution, Kol Halev Performance Ensemble, MOST/Bridge Russian Seniors, Outlook Magazine and the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival.

A Peretz quote inscribed on a large sign at the entrance to the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture, “perfectly expresses the sentiments of the Jewish Museum & Archives of British Columbia” as mentioned by Shirley Barnett, board member of the Jewish Historical Society of BC while scouting for a new location last fall: 

“A people’s memory is history. A people without a history can grow neither wiser nor better.” – Isaac Leyb Peretz (1852-1915)

The Jewish Museum & Archives of British Columbia, previously located on the third floor of the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, is the preeminent and authoritative body for the collection and sharing of community memory of Jewish life in British Columbia.  Since 1970, the Society’s work has included operating the Jewish Museum & Archives of British Columbia, publishing a regular journal, The Scribe, authoring several books, recording oral histories of community members throughout the province, and preserving and making accessible the important photographs and records of the Jewish community through traveling exhibits and educational programs.

An Open House and tour of the new facilities will take place on Sunday, March 27, 2011 from 11:00 am – 5:00 pm.

The Work of Art in the Age of Google

Uffizi Museum/Google Art Project, On Art Project, you can look closely at the details of works like Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.”

It is very much a work in progress, full of bugs and information gaps, and sometimes blurry, careering virtual tours. But it is already a mesmerizing, world-expanding tool for self-education. You can spend hours exploring it, examining paintings from far off and close up, poking around some of the world’s great museums all by your lonesome. I have, and my advice is: Expect mood swings. This adventure is not without frustrations.

On the virtual tour of the Uffizi in Florence the paintings are sometimes little more than framed smudges on the wall. (The Dürer room: don’t go there.) But you can look at Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” almost inch by inch. It’s nothing like standing before the real, breathing thing. What you see is a very good reproduction that offers the option to pore over the surface with an adjustable magnifying rectangle. This feels like an eerie approximation, at a clinical, digital remove, of the kind of intimacy usually granted only to the artist and his assistants, or conservators and preparators.

There are high-resolution images of more than 1,000 artworks in the rt Project (googleartproject.com) and virtual tours of several hundred galleries and other spaces inside the 17 participating institutions.  In addition each museum has selected a single, usually canonical work - like Botticelli "Venus" - for star treatment.  These works have been painstakingly photographed for super-high, mega-pixel resolution.  (Although often, to my eye, the high-resolution version seems as good as the mega-pixel one.)

The Museum of Modern Art selected van Gogh's "Starry Night," and you can see not only the individual colors in each stroke, but also how much of the canvas he left bare. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's star painting is Bruegel's "Harvesters," with its sloping slab of yellow wheat and peasants lunching in the foreground. Deep in the background is a group of women skinny-dipping in a pond that I had never noticed before.

In the case of van Gogh's famous "Bedroom," the star painting chosen by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, I was able to scrutinize the five framed artworks depicted on the chamber's walls: two portraits, one still life and two works, possibly on paper, that are so cursory they look like contemporary abstractions. And I was enthralled by the clarity of the star painting of the National Gallery in London, Hans Holbein's "Ambassadors," and especially by the wonderful pile of scientific instruments — globes, sun dials, books — that occupy the imposing two-tiered stand flanked by the two young gentlemen.

Google maintains that, beyond details you may not have noticed before, you can see things not normally visible to the human eye. And it is probably true. I could make out Bruegel's distant bathers when I visited the Met for a comparison viewing, but not the buttocks of one skinny-dipper, visible above the waves using the Google zoom. Still, the most unusual aspects of the experience are time, quiet and stasis: you can look from a seated position in the comfort of your own home or office cubicle, for as long as you want, without being jostled or blocked by other art lovers.

At the same time the chance to look closely at paintings, especially, as made things, really to study the way artists construct an image on a flat surface, is amazing, and great practice for looking at actual works. And while the Internet makes so much in our world more immediate, it is still surprising to see what it can accomplish with the subtle physicality of painting, whether it is the nervous, fractured, tilting brush strokes of Cezanne's "Château Noir" from 1903-4, at the Museum of Modern Art, or the tiny pelletlike dots that make up most of Chris Ofili's "No Woman No Cry" from about a century later at the Tate Modern in London (the only postwar work among the 17 mega-pixel stars).

The Ofili surface also involves collaged images of Stephen Lawrence, whose 1993 murder in London became a turning point in Britain's racial politics; along with scatterings of glitter that read like minuscule, oddly cubic bits of gold and silver; and three of those endlessly fussed-over clumps of elephant dung, carefully shellacked and in two cases beaded with the word No. Take a good look and see how benign they really are. (You can also see the painting glow in the dark, revealing the lines "R.I.P./Stephen Lawrence/1974-1993.")

Another innovation of the Art Project is Google's adaptation of its Street View program for indoor use. This makes it possible, for example, to navigate through several of the spacious salons at Versailles gazing at ceiling murals — thanks to the 360-degree navigation — or to get a sharper, more immediate sense than any guidebook can provide of the light, layout and ambience of the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. It also means that if your skill set is shaky, you can suddenly be 86'ed from the museum onto the street, as I was several times while exploring the National Gallery.

Keep in mind that usually only a few of the many, many works encountered on a virtual tour are available for high-res or super-high-res viewing. And those few aren’t always seen in situ, hanging in a gallery. The architectural mise-en-scène is the main event of the virtual tours in most cases, from the Uffizi’s long, grand hallways to the gift shop of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the modest galleries of the Kampa Museum in Prague, where the star paintings is Frantisek Kupka’s 1912-13 “Cathedral,” the only abstraction among what could be called the Google 17.

The Art Project has been hailed as a great leap forward in terms of the online art experience, which seems debatable, since most museums have spent at least the last decade — and quite a bit of money — developing Web access to works in their collections. On the site of the National Gallery, for example, you can examine the lush surface of Velázquez’s “Rokeby Venus” with a zoom similar to the Art Project’s. Still, Google offers a distinct and extraordinary benefit in its United Nations-like gathering of different collections under one technological umbrella, enabling easy online travel among them.

When you view a work by one artist at one museum, clicking on the link “More works by this artist” will produce a list of all the others in the Art Project system. But some fine-tuning is needed here. Sometimes the link is missing, and sometimes it links only to other works in that museum. Other tweaks to consider: including the dates of the works on all pull-down lists, and providing measurements in inches as well as centimeters.

Despite the roster of world-class museums, there are notable omissions: titans like the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Prado in Madrid and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, not to mention most major American museums, starting with the National Gallery in Washington. Without specifying who turned it down, Google says that many museums were approached, that 17 signed on, and that it hopes to add more as the project develops.

This implies an understandable wait-and-see attitude from many institutions, including some of the participants. The Museum of Modern Art, for example, has made only one large gallery available — the large room of French Post-Impressionist works that kicks off its permanent collection displays — along with 17 paintings that are all, again, examples of 19th-century Post-Impressionism. (Oh, and you can wander around the lobby.)

On first glance this seems both unmodern in focus and a tad miserly, given that several museums offer more than 100 works and at least 15 galleries. But MoMA is being pragmatic. According to Kim Mitchell, the museum’s chief communications officer , the 17 paintings “are among the few in our collection that do not raise the copyright-related issues that affect so many works of modern and contemporary art.” In other words, if and when the Art Project is a clear success, the Modern will decide if it wants to spend the time and money to secure permission for Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and the like to appear on it.

This might also hold true for the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, which owns Picasso’s “Guernica,” but has so far limited its participation primarily to 13 paintings by the Cubist Juan Gris and 35 photographs from the Spanish Civil War. Needless to say, the works and galleries that each museum has selected for the first round of the Art Project makes for some interesting institutional psychoanalysis.

From where I sit Google’s Art Project looks like a bandwagon everyone should jump on. It makes visual knowledge more accessible, which benefits us all.

In many ways this new Google venture is simply the latest phase of simulation that began with the invention of photography, which is when artworks first acquired second lives as images and in a sense, started going viral. These earlier iterations — while never more than the next best thing — have been providing pleasure for more than a century through art books, as postcards, posters and art-history-lecture slides. For all that time they have been the next best thing to being there. Now the next best thing has become better, even if it will never be more than next best.

Putting The Jewish In The Jewish Museum

Joan Rosenbaum, who is retiring after 30 years, put her stamp
on the institution and never shied away from controversy.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Eric Herschthal,Staff Writer

During the 1960s, The Jewish Museum was at the vanguard of the contemporary art world, mounting career-defining shows for artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. In those days many in the emerging art world were Jews — artists like Mark Rothko and Diane Arbus, the dealer Leo Castelli, the critic Clement Greenberg (though not Rauschenberg and Johns) — and the museum made it its mission to champion their work.

But by 1971, the museum underwent a sea change. The board of trustees brought in a new director, Joy Ungerleider-Mayerson, they wanted to focus on the museum's original mission, which since its founding in 1904, was to showcase the whole of Jewish history and culture, not just art. The museum had amassed a treasure trove of precious Judaica and archaeological artifacts from Israel and felt it should be highlighting those pieces instead.

So when yet another new director — Joan Rosenbaum, then a 38-year-old nonprofit museum administrator with a fine art background — was chosen in 1981, it was unclear what direction she would take the museum. "When I came in, there were many things going on," said Rosenbaum, 67, who announced her retirement last week after 30 years at the helm.

But in short order she defined her mission, and the museum's along with it. She would put equal emphasis on both fine art and Jewish history and culture. And perhaps most critically, she'd try to get the museum on par with the city's premier art museums, including the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art.

"By scale it's small," said Richard Armstrong, director of the Guggenheim Museum, which averages about five times as many visitors annually as The Jewish Museum's 200,000. "It was a place I went to less frequently" during the 1970s, he added, "but when Joan got there, it became a necessity."

Susan Talbott, director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum in Hartford, Conn., who has known Rosenbaum since the her days at the Whitney in the 1980s, echoed that sentiment: "All I can say is that The Jewish Museum was not on my radar screen in the seventies," she said, "but it has been since Joan's been there."

Rosenbaum discussed her career in her spacious corner office in the museum's Upper East Side home, which has doubled in size under her tenure.

She disagreed with the notion that she shifted the museum's focus back to fine art when she arrived, saying instead that she only gave it an increased focus. After all, she noted, one of the first major projects she initiated was the expansion of the museum's building. At its center would be a new permanent exhibit, "Culture and Continuity: The Jewish Journey," which would tell the story of the Jewish people's 4,000-year history.

The exhibit opened in tandem with the museum's $60 million expansion in 1993. The fundraising campaign also provided the foundation with its endowment, which today stands at around $94 million, more than 50 percent larger than the Guggenheim's $62 million.

"I thought the museum was very well positioned to present exhibitions that combined art and Jewish culture," Rosenbaum said. "It took time for that to take hold, but I think that we succeeded."

It's hard to disagree. The museum now has an annual operating budget of about $15 million, compared to $1 million when she arrived. A seat on its board of trustees, which has 41 deep-pocketed members, compared to 26 when she arrived, has become a mark of distinction perhaps as never before.

Joshua Nash, the current chairman of the board of trustees, said that Rosenbaum has made an aggressive push to get younger patrons on the board in the last decade. Today about a third of its trustees are around 50 or younger. And many, like Nash, a 49-year-old investment firm executive, are encouraged to take prominent roles. "It's normally very difficult for young people to assume leadership positions," said Nash. "But it's been something she's spearheaded."

When The Jewish Museum opens a new exhibit these days, it generates as much coverage, and at times controversy, as any major museum. A case in point is The Jewish Museum's 2002 show "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art," which drew national coverage after several Holocaust survivors complained that it trivialized the Holocaust.

But Norman Kleeblatt, the show's curator and now the museum's chief curator, said that he and Rosenbaum knew the show might offend some viewers. Not long after Rosenbaum arrived, she instituted focus groups with potential audience members that would give feedback on every developing show idea.

Some Holocaust survivors focused on certain pieces, like Zyklon B gas canisters painted with Chanel logos, that seemed particularly offensive. But rather than simply pull those works out of the show entirely and risk further condemnation — like what the National Portrait Gallery in Washington did last week, removing a work by a gay artist (it featured ants on a crucifix) after the Catholic League deemed it offensive — Rosenbaum cut a compromise. She placed the most provocative pieces in a separate room and wrote wall texts warning viewers of the sensitive subject matter.

"It's an incredible example of how a museum acts responsibly and doesn't pull away from controversy," said Steven Dubin, a professor of arts administration at the Teacher's College at Columbia University and author of "Displays of Power," a history of controversial art exhibits. He said he uses "Mirroring Evil" as a case study in how to respect the sensitivities of certain audiences without caving in to outside pressure.

Reflecting on that show, Rosenbaum said that the entire controversy might have been avoided had she not allowed a reporter to see the show's catalogue months before the show opened. In an article, the reporter drew a comparison to the Brooklyn Museum's "Sensation" exhibit, which spawned intense public scrutiny three years earlier. The difference was that by the time "Mirroring Evil" actually opened, the controversy had largely abated. Many critics panned the show as simply bad art, but few were morally outraged. And tellingly, no one protested.

Rosenbaum now says she has few regrets: "I am proud of that show," she said. "I think people may have misunderstood what it was about. ... It was about how young artists were responding to the imagery of the Holocaust" and not about the Holocaust itself.

But Rosenbaum's most enduring legacy may be mounting challenging shows that question core issues of Jewish identity, without dumbing them down. Under her tenure, curators have consistently engaged the Holocaust and Israel, as well roles Jews have played in the arts, both highbrow and mainstream, in America and abroad.

When asked if she considers some of her shows populist, she said, "We always consider whether a show will be popular or not, but it doesn't start that way. It really starts with a curator making a really good proposal, with good art and good objects to show, and a good story to tell."

Rosenbaum has mounted popular family-oriented shows as well, but they tend to be buttressed by intellectually serious arguments: a show on Shrek, for instance, addressed the deeper psychological motivations of its creator, William Steig. And a recent show on Curious George detailed how its creators, German Jews living in Paris, escaped Nazi-occupied Europe and how that experience influenced the Curious George books.

Exhibits on artists like Man Ray and Amedeo Modigliani, the latter of which drew attendance records, have also led many to rethink the role artists' Jewish backgrounds have played in their art. "For someone who's not Jewish," said Armstrong, the Guggenheim's director, The Jewish Museum's exhibits "add real dimension to my understanding of modern and contemporary art."

Scholars have also benefited from another Rosenbaum initiative: catalogues that are co-published with Yale University Press. Many of them feature learned essays by academics that become fodder for future research. "The museum not only receives the scholarship of others, it actually generates it," said Jenna Weissman Joselit, a prominent scholar of Jewish history, and the Charles E. Smith Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of History at The George Washington University.

Weissman Joselit added that The Jewish Museum has also benefited from a fundamental shift in the nature of the American Jewish community. As Americans have become more secular and synagogues less visited, the museum has taken an increasingly important role in Jewish life. "The Jewish Museum has stepped into the breach," she noted. "That might have happened anyway, but there's no doubt that Joan was the right person at the right time."

Rosenbaum acknowledges that all ethnic museums, The Jewish Museum included, have been helped by the broader interest in group identity that's taken hold since the 1960s. But most new Jewish museums have centered that identity on either the Holocaust or the tale of American achievement. In the past two decades, for instance, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the recently opened National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia have been the most prominent additions.

Like those museums, Rosenbaum has engaged the central interests of her core community. But most agree that she's done it by challenging basic assumptions and broadening conclusions. "It seems to me that very few museums get past the rah-rah phase," said Dubin, of Columbia's Teacher's College. "For the most part, those [ethnic museums] are pretty damn boring. But the Jewish museum has gone well beyond the rah-rah phase that still many Jewish museums are in." He went on, "It doesn't need to prove itself anymore."

When Rosenbaum announced her retirement last week, many within the art world, even her own institution, said they were surprised. But Rosenbaum leaves at time when younger Jewish museums are thriving. Across the country, Jewish museums are either growing or sprouting anew. Not only is there the new history museum in Philadelphia, but there is also the rebuilt Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. For some of these museums' leaders, Rosenbaum has set a new standard.

"She's really a role model for museum directors everywhere," said Connie Wolf, the current director of the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM). Wolf, 51, said that when she became the CJM's director 12 years ago, Rosenbaum told her she'd give any help she needed.

Rosenbaum's been true to her word: since the CJM moved into its new Daniel Libeskind-designed building in 2008, The Jewish Museum has shipped many of its exhibits to San Francisco. That is critical for the CJM, whose new building has created high expectations, but which still lacks a permanent collection. "In the museum world, you have to have friends," said Wolf, "and Joan's been a very close one of mine."

But Rosenbaum said that after 30 years, she felt it was simply time to move on. The Jewish Museum has hired a search firm that will work with its board of directors to pick a new director, who'll be announced in the next six months, said Nash. And Rosenbaum will officially leave on the last day of June.

When asked if she has any vision for the museum in the years ahead, she said: "I leave that up to the new director to decide." But, still vigorous and only 67, she says she is open to taking on another job somewhere else. As she put it: "I'm not ready to hang up my dancing shoes yet."

Philadelphia - Freedom is the grand theme of the new National Museum of American Jewish History, which is set to open its doors in November. In a way, the museum's location demands that it engage with such a large, universal concept. It is housed in an imposing glass box in the center of Philadelphia, with a commanding view of the grassy mall that stretches from the National Constitution Center to the red brick edifice where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. This is not the Lower East Side.

The desire to be "in conversation" with these surrounding pillars of American history extends to the permanent exhibit itself, which takes up three of the five floors in the museum, corresponding to three distinct historical periods. Each starts off by illustrating a historical shift that speaks to the larger national experience, one that is by no means unique to Jews in America.

The opening section of the exhibit that fills the first floor, "Foundations of Freedom" (1664-1880), begins with the colonial era and the Revolutionary War, a large musket greeting the visitor. The exhibit on the second floor, "Dreams of Freedom" (1880-1945), introduces the massive immigration waves of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with Jews described as 2 million of the 20 million who arrived. The last, and slightly smaller, floor of the exhibit is titled "Choices and Challenges of Freedom" (1945-Present) and uses suburbanization and its consequences in order to set the tone for the postwar era.

As an introduction to American history, then, the museum offers a sweeping and engaging tour. It's also outfitted with all the multimedia and visitor-centric elements that history museums have embraced over the past decade. In addition to physical objects, sound fills the space, in the form of recorded readings or music. Computers and videos with interactive programs also abound - from the testimonies of Jewish soldiers in World War II to a screen that allows you to view and upload photos from your Jewish summer camp experience. And the museum is self-consciously family-friendly. In the section that describes the westward movement of some Jews, there is a wagon to climb on; and to get a feel of 1950s Jewish America, kids can play in a fully outfitted suburban kitchen.

In addition to embedding the Jewish story firmly within the larger American narrative, the curators have worked hard to avoid the triumphal tone of ethnic achievement that could have easily turned such a museum into no more than an exercise in kitsch. And they have, for the most part, succeeded. Pride is, generally, tempered with reality. So there is no avoidance of the Jewish role in the Confederacy, illustrated here by a fascinating artifact: a Confederate $2 banknote bearing the face of the Confederate's Jewish secretary of state, Judah Benjamin.

There is no shying away from the passivity of those American Jews during World War II who sought a "quieter approach" to help their brethren. Though there is a room dominated by the singing of Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel and devoted to the Jewish role in the movement for civil rights (as well as to the feminist and Soviet Jewry movements), there is also mention of those who weren't too keen on protesting. Even American bar and bat mitzvahs are described as "endearingly remembered but sometimes criticized for their extravagant opulence."

And there is an effort to offer alternative narratives of the American Jewish past. Jewish mobsters like Arnold Rothstein get their due. The section next to the one on tenement living treats Jews from more rural settings, like the immigrants who came through Galveston, Texas. There are also surprising artifacts to this effect, like the sheath of the knife of a 19th-century schochet, or ritual slaughterer, which is decorated with an American flag.

Some subjects, though, remain perplexingly untouched. Most glaringly avoided is the complex role that Israel has played in American Jewish identity over the past century. The birth of the Jewish state, which was not universally applauded in America, is painted largely as an unmitigated celebration for the community. The only references made to the tension and challenge that Zionism presented to Americans are two quotes that frame a video loop of the United Nations announcement proclaiming Israel to be a state. David Ben-Gurion's declaration stating, "Our next task consists of bringing all Jews to Israel," floats about the words of Jacob Blaustein, president of the American Jewish Committee: "To American Jews, America is home." The issue is explored no further. The way that Israel has divided parts of the Jewish community following the Six Day War is similarly absent- though this has been no small part of American Jewish life.

A serious consideration of religion is also lacking. Only the slightest reference is made to Hasidism, for example, despite the fact that it constitutes arguably one of the most potent religious forces in American Jewish life today. It's not that the history of faith or of the changing forms of practice is completely ignored. The origins of the various denominations are laid out - particularly the shocking "Trefa Banquet" of 1883, the first rabbinical ordination of the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where frogs legs and shrimp were served. There is also a beautiful film that shows off some of the more interesting Modernist synagogue architecture of the 20th century. But there is no real exploration of how American Jews have, in large part, moved away from religious practice or of what this says about the community.

The absence of religion is not surprising, given the largely secular focus of Jewish achievement described here. It is striking - and perhaps a little depressing - that the last room of the exhibit exploring the freedom finally won is a collection of pop culture created by Jews. Barbra Streisand's 1977 album, "Superman," is displayed behind glass. And playing on the same video screen in a loop is a clip from the sitcom "Seinfeld," as well as Adam Sandler performing his "Hanukkah Song" and Sarah Silverman doing her lewd standup comedy act. Meant as a final exclamation point to the story, the clip does more to prompt the question: Is this the reward of freedom - Babs and the Soup Nazi shtick?

Freedom is a self-consciously loaded theme, and though the last era explored bears the title "Choices and Challenges of Freedom," there is nothing in the exhibit to indicate the deep anxiety that has accompanied integration into American life. What did Jews lose as they became Americans? Did this freedom have its costs?

After all, freedom in the American context also includes the freedom not to be Jewish. The arc described by the exhibit would, in the eyes of some American Jews - like those neglected Hasidim - seem one of disintegration, a swift departure from the source of identity. Besides a final interactive section in which visitors can answer provocative questions such as "Are Jews white?" by writing on a sticky note that is then scanned in and projected on a screen, there is not much space devoted to the downside of this unfettered liberty or even to how long Jews will maintain a hyphenated identity in America.

This, however, doesn't take away from the achievement of the museum. It is clearly meant to be more wide-ranging and comprehensive than profound or probing. It offers a fascinating breeze through the Jewish experience in America, but one that is very consciously presented as an exemplar of the immigrant experience as a whole. Even if the decision to skew toward the universal and away from the particular involves the sacrifice of some complexity and of some uncomfortable questions, this choice allows the museum to earn its place on Independence Mall. The new museum is in fact a fitting continuation of the story of those principles enshrined in the founding documents, showing us what they actually meant for those who made their home in America.

In grade school, Randy Schoenberg made a 12-foot-tall family tree. In college at Princeton, he led a Holocaust Remembrance Day. As a litigator, he argued all the way to the Supreme Court on behalf of Maria Altmann and ultimately recovered five Nazi-looted Klimt paintings from Austria for his client.

"A psychiatrist from Vienna once gave me an article about this syndrome called the torchbearer syndrome," says Schoenberg, 44, who has the intense, heavy-lidded eyes of his paternal grandfather, composer Arnold Schoenberg. "It's very common in families affected by the Holocaust, where you have one person in the next generation or the generation after who becomes the keeper of mementos, the teller of family stories, the one who's interested in preserving the history."

Now Schoenberg, an L.A. native, has embarked on what might be his most ambitious historical undertaking: overseeing and helping to finance with his gains from the Altmann case the expansion of the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in its new home in Pan Pacific Park. A 14,000-square-foot concrete cave of a building designed by Hagy Belzberg, the museum officially opens to the public Thursday with a ribbon-cutting ceremony expected to attract Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other dignitaries.

The new museum has nine galleries, covering topics that include pre-Holocaust Europe, the horrors of the concentration camps, and accounts of rescue and resistance. The goal, Schoenberg says, is to showcase artifacts and documents from the museum's 3,000-plus-piece collection, alongside reproductions, such as large-scale photographs, that give the items context.

"In theory we could have made this one big theater and showed ' Schindler's List' on a reel all day long," he says. "That would be wonderful in one way, but our goal is to show original artifacts so people feel like they're in the presence of this terrible event - something tangible they can see and almost feel."

He gestures toward a child's shoe in a display case: "The idea is that this shoe belonged to an innocent child."

Schoenberg says this content distinguishes the museum, founded in 1961, from the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, which opened in 1993. As its name suggests, the Museum of Tolerance goes beyond the Holocaust to consider contemporary genocides and other sorts of discrimination, past and present, such as public school segregation or cyber-bullying.

Years in the works, a planned Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem took a significant step forward this week when the Simon Wiesenthal Center unveiled new architectural designs for the structure, saying that the museum is likely to be completed in four years.

The new design, which was created by the Israeli firm Chyutin Architects, calls for a sixstory structure -- three stories below ground and three above -- with approximately 150,000 to 160,000 square feet of space. By comparison, the Center's main facilities in Los Angeles total about 110,000 square feet of space.

The complex is expected to feature exhibition space, a theater, an educational center as well as an outdoor sunken area in front of the building with a garden and amphitheater.

With an estimated price tag of $100 million, the new museum is significantly less expensive than the one designed by Frank Gehry, which would have cost at least $250 million, according to the Center.

Earlier this year, Gehry and the Center decided to part ways on the project in part because the Center's board of trustees wished to downsize the museum in response to the slumping economy. Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the
Museum of Tolerance, said that the organization held a competition between three Israeli architecture firms, and that the board unanimously chose the design put forth by
Chyutin.

So far, the Center has raised about 50% of the budget needed to complete the new museum. "We are confident that we will raise the money once the construction begins,"
said Hier on the phone from Jerusalem.

The planned museum has been a source of controversy in recent years because it is being built on what was once a part of a Muslim cemetery. Arab leaders in Israel sued to halt the museum after bones were unearthed from the site, with some calling the project a form of religious and ethnic oppression.  In late 2008, Israel's Supreme Court gave the OK for the project to continue but required that museum builders consult with Israel's Antiquities Authority on how to rebury any remains unearthed during construction and on creating a barrier between graves and the building's foundation.

Hier said Tuesday that the site has been verified as cleared of graves and that recovered bones have been re-interred elsewhere.

The front of the new museum will face a commercial area while the back faces Independence Park in Jerusalem. The Center said the back features glass walls from top
to bottom, seen below, to create a warmer and more inviting atmosphere.
-- David Ng

Photo Credits:  Chyutin Architects /

District's first synagogue slated for move to make way for mixed-use development

It's been called the "Small Jewish Museum That Could" and the "Wandering Building" after the medieval tale of the doomed Wandering Jew. And for good reason.

In the 134 years since a splinter group of European-born Orthodox Jews built the city's first synagogue in downtown Washington, it has been turned over to three congregations; converted into a grocery store and a barbecue joint; slated for demolition, saved and dubbed a historic landmark; literally cut in half and torn from its foundation; and moved, inch by inch, to Third Street NW, where it was renovated and reopened as a museum in an area that has followed the city's economic fortunes from blighted to prosperous to recession.

And now the Lillian and Albert Small Jewish Museum needs to be moved again -- twice -- for one more tiring and costly journey to enable three prime blocks, as if a miracle, to be added to downtown's buildable area. The New York-based Louis Dreyfus Property Group struck an agreement this spring with the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington to help move the building so a deck can be added above an entrance to Interstate 395 south of Massachusetts Avenue NW, with high-rises and greenery where there is now only a recessed highway.

"It's an odd confluence of events," said Laura Cohen Apelbaum, executive director of the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington. "The synagogue has always somehow been saved by its geography, in that it's never been torn down. But it's been hindered by where it is, too."

The 273-ton structure has to be delicately uprooted and moved by flatbed truck -- first to a temporary spot, perhaps on the lawn of the nearby National Building Museum, and then to its permanent home at Third and F streets NW.

"This is a once-in-forever move," said Stuart Zuckerman, past president of the Historical Society's board of directors, which worked for nearly two years to arrange the unusual transport. "And we hope it will give us added exposure."

It could be several years before the Small Museum is planted in its final spot, said Sean Cahill, Dreyfus's vice president of development. It's also not the first time the synagogue has faced a "wing-and-a-prayer-type move," Zuckerman said.

When the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority decided to build its headquarters on the block spanning Fifth and Sixth streets NW, the brick synagogue was forced to find a new home or face demolition. Through the historical society's efforts in the late 1960s, the building became a federal and city landmark, and engendered both congressional support and a horde of private donors.

On a December morning in 1969, the second and third floors of the building were severed from the ground floor, lifted and placed on a dolly nine feet off the ground and rolled three blocks to 701 Third St. NW. The first floor, which had been outfitted with big bay windows so shopkeepers could sell their wares, was too weak to make the trip. Hundreds watched the 2 1/2 -hour move, which in its complexity caused one small fire after a gas main burst, broke off branches from elm trees and killed a pigeon. The building arrived intact.

"It really reignited the interest in Jewish history and culture in Washington. It reawakened a lot of people," said Phyllis Myers, a preservationist who has served as a research consultant for an exhibit on synagogues in Washington.

The Adas Israel synagogue was erected in 1876 by a group of about three dozen Jewish families angry over liberal reforms instituted at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, including the new practice of seating men and women together, the use of English-language prayers and the playing of Christian-style organ music during hymns. The cast offs raised $4,800 to construct the red-brick building in Washington's "Synagogue Row," which served downtown's immigrants along the growing Seventh Street commercial corridor.

President Ulysses S. Grant attended the dedication ceremony on June 9, 1876, the first time a U.S. president attended at a Jewish religious service.

When the congregation outgrew the 25-by-60-foot building, Adas Israel moved in 1908 to a grander location at Sixth and I streets NW. The old synagogue was left behind, later serving as a Greek Orthodox church, St. Sophia's, and then the Evangelical Church of God. After World War II, it became a carryout restaurant (that, oddly enough, sold pork barbecue), a grocery store and then a lunchroom.

Its history was all but forgotten until a student of Jewish architecture and religious art, Evelyn Levow Greenberg, rediscovered the building's past and launched a spirited campaign to save it.

"Who would have ever thought it would be moved again?" said Henry H. Brylawski, 97, who as president of the Jewish Historical Society helped oversee the temple's first move 41 years ago. "We had no money and the city wasn't really all that interested in the building, but they were nice enough to go along with it. But now, it's taken on a lot of meaning."

Washington never drew the numbers of working-class European Jews who established enclaves in cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. In the 1850s, the District had fewer than 3,000 Jewish residents in a total population of 40,000. In the 20 years following World War II, Jews left Northwest in droves, scattering to Maryland and Northern Virginia. Much of Seventh Street NW became rundown, especially after the city's devastating riots in 1968.

But the historic Adas Israel sanctuary has remained one of the area's enduring landmarks, Brylawski said. Wolf von Eckardt, The Washington Post's former art and architecture critic, once called it a "dear and most lovable little building of utmost simplicity."

The Small Museum is open nine hours a week, and a full walking tour takes about 10 minutes. It is estimated that a few hundred people tour the building each year.

Something positive will come out of the move, officials say: The synagogue will now face east, the proper orientation for Jewish places of worship.

When the congregation outgrew the 25-by-60-foot building, Adas Israel moved in 1908 to a grander location at Sixth and I streets NW. The old synagogue was left behind, later serving as a Greek Orthodox church, St. Sophia's, and then the Evangelical Church of God. After World War II, it became a carryout restaurant (that, oddly enough, sold pork barbecue), a grocery store and then a lunchroom.

Its history was all but forgotten until a student of Jewish architecture and religious art, Evelyn Levow Greenberg, rediscovered the building's past and launched a spirited campaign to save it.

"Who would have ever thought it would be moved again?" said Henry H. Brylawski, 97, who as president of the Jewish Historical Society helped oversee the temple's first move 41 years ago. "We had no money and the city wasn't really all that interested in the building, but they were nice enough to go along with it. But now, it's taken on a lot of meaning."

Washington never drew the numbers of working-class European Jews who established enclaves in cities such as Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. In the 1850s, the District had fewer than 3,000 Jewish residents in a total population of 40,000. In the 20 years following World War II, Jews left Northwest in droves, scattering to Maryland and Northern Virginia. Much of Seventh Street NW became rundown, especially after the city's devastating riots in 1968.

But the historic Adas Israel sanctuary has remained one of the area's enduring landmarks, Brylawski said. Wolf von Eckardt, The Washington Post's former art and architecture critic, once called it a "dear and most lovable little building of utmost simplicity."

The Small Museum is open nine hours a week, and a full walking tour takes about 10 minutes. It is estimated that a few hundred people tour the building each year.

Something positive will come out of the move, officials say: The synagogue will now face east, the proper orientation for Jewish places of worship.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/02/AR2010080205020_2.html

STUDY: RECESSION TAKES TOLL ON MUSEUM WORKERS

Washington, DC (July 15, 2010) ─Nearly 40 percent of nonprofit organizations - and 53 percent of museums - lack adequate staffing to deliver programs and services. According to a national survey released yesterday by the Nonprofit Listening Post Project at Johns Hopkins University, "Recession Pressures on Nonprofit Jobs," arts and culture organizations have been particularly hard hit by the nation's economic downturn. The American Association of Museums is a partner in the Listening Post Project. .

The survey results reflect findings from previous studies by both the Center for Civil Society Studies at Johns Hopkins and AAM. In a previous Listening Post survey, 34 percent of nonprofit organizations reported eliminating staff positions and 41 percent postponed filling new positions during the six months between September 2008 and March 2009.

In a January 2010 study from AAM entitled Service Despite Stress, more than two-thirds (67.1%) of museums reported at least moderate financial stress in 2009. For 8.4% of museums the stress level was severe (defined as "bad, but I have seen worse in the previous 5 years") and for 17.8% the financial stress was very severe (defined as "the very worst I have seen in at least 5 years"). At the same time, attendance increased at a majority of museums in 2009.

"This important study from the Johns Hopkins Listening Post Project confirms what we have heard anecdotally, from all types of museums and in every region of the country," said AAM president Ford W. Bell. "Namely, that America's museums are being asked to provide more services to a public hungry for them, including voids created by cuts in local governments' budgets, all without the adequate resources to do so."

Workforce reductions are only part of the story. Nonprofits have been forced to take additional actions that impact their own workers and reduce their ability to deliver critical programs and services. Among responding organizations, over the recent six-month period covered by the new survey:

• 49 percent "refined job descriptions," often a euphemism for increasing employee workloads and assigning the responsibilities of laid-off staff to remaining employees.

• 39 percent implemented a salary freeze.

• 36 percent postponed filling new positions.

• Other nonprofits in the survey increased staff hours (23 percent), cut or reduced benefits (23 percent), increased non-program work for program staff (12 percent), and reduced wages (12 percent).

Changes in employment varied significantly by field. Organizations in two of the six fields covered in the survey (elderly services and community and economic development) reported overall employment growth, the former by 0.6 percent and the latter by 5 percent. This was likely a result of continued economic recovery program spending. In contrast, nonprofit theaters reported job reductions of 6 percent. The remaining three fields that participate in the Listening Post Project also recorded reductions - museums (-1 percent), orchestras (-3 percent), and children and family service organizations (-0.7 percent).

"The pressures on nonprofits have accelerated and are clearly taking their toll," noted Lester Salamon, report author and director of the Center for Civil Society Studies. "Organizations have shown enormous resilience and commitment to their critical missions, but this has come at a price."

The full report "Recession Pressures on Nonprofit Jobs" is available online at http://ccss.jhu.edu.