They sang. They drank. They broke unleavened bread with a band member.

And now, the group of Bruce Springsteen fans who reconciled their dual commitments last Friday - the Passover holiday and a concert at Madison Square Garden - with a special "rock 'n' roll Seder" will be enshrined for posterity.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage has requested for its collection a copy of the customized Haggadah used for the Seder. Among the prayer book's uncommon trappings were an image of Mr. Springsteen's face, transposed over a pyramid on the front cover; lyrics to an original song, "Matzo Ball," meant to be sung to the tune of Mr. Springsteen's "Wrecking Ball"; and a modified take on a traditional Passover refrain, scrawled across the cover: "This year at the Garden, next year in Jerusalem."

Organized by Warren Rosen, 46, the owner of an insurance company in the city, the preconcert Seder attracted about 18 people, including the saxophonist Jake Clemons, the nephew of the late Clarence Clemons and a recent addition to the E Street Band.

"I was very honored," Mr. Rosen said of the museum's interest. "Twenty years from now, someone can go the museum and say, ‘Wow, somebody threw a Seder at the Garden for a Springsteen concert.'"

Abby R. Spilka, the museum's associate director, said in a telephone interview that the Haggadah, designed by Mr. Rosen's wife, Jane, captured a sense of "tradition in a modern context."

After reading an article about the Seder in The New York Times on Saturday, Ms. Spilka wrote an e-mail to Esther Brumberg, the museum's senior curator of collections, to gauge interest in acquiring the Haggadah. "Sounds nifty," Ms. Brumberg replied, before reaching out to Mr. Rosen.

"We collect artifacts of contemporary Jewish life," Ms. Spilka said. "There's a threshold question of: Would we regret not having this?"

The item will enter the museum's collection of 20th- and 21st-century artifacts, which includes images of adult women at their bat mitzvahs and baby-naming announcements for Jewish families adopting Chinese children, Ms. Spilka said.

Mr. Rosen said he planned to personally deliver the requested artifacts - two copies of the Haggadah and a handful of pictures - within the next week.

Since the story appeared, Mr. Rosen said he had received a deluge of messages from friends, strangers and even a couple of rabbis.

He also attended Mr. Springsteen's second show at Madison Square Garden on Monday night, crossing paths with a fan who seemed to recognize his face from the news.

The man told Mr. Rosen he was angry with him. Mr. Rosen asked why.

"Because," Mr. Rosen recalled the man saying, "I had the same idea."

Jerusalem ...Until Tuesday, if history buffs wanted a glimpse of the Israel Museum's vast collection - including a 9,000-year-old carved human face found in the Judean Desert - they would have to travel to Jerusalem to see it.

Now, through a joint venture with Google Inc., people from around the world can examine the ancient Neolithic artifact, which the museum says is the oldest in the world, in greater detail than ever before with a simple click of a mouse from the comfort of their own home.

The mask is just one of 520 objects made available as part of the museum's partnership with the Google Art Project, an online compilation of high-resolution images of artwork from galleries worldwide, as well as a virtual tour of the museums using the high-tech giant's Google Street technology.

The Israel Museum was among 151 museums in 40 countries taking part in the second wave of the project on Tuesday. It was first launched last February in just 17 museums, including the Tate Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Uffizi in Florence and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

"We can take the experience of our Israel Museum worldwide, we can give people far away who will never get here a chance, palpably, to feel what this place is about and we will give plenty of people who plan to come here an advance opportunity to get a handle on what this experience is about," said museum director James Snyder.

Other items included are the interior of the 18th-century Vittorio Veneto Synagogue in Italy, Claude Monet's famous "Water Lilies" painting and the Bronze Medallion of Titus - a rare coin that depicts the Colosseum in Rome.

The project follows last year's collaboration with Google to make the museum's famed Dead Sea Scrolls accessible to all online. The site drew a million viewers within a few days by allowing the public to explore these ancient biblical texts in greater detail than what was possible in person.

The Google Art Project creates a similar experience. With images larger than a gigapixel (1 billion pixels) in size, the zoom-in feature allows viewers to get inside cracks in the parchment and other details that are not visible to the naked eye.

For instance, in Peter Paul Rubens' masterpiece "The Death of Adonis," the technology allows the viewer to focus on a tear on the cheek of Venus that isn't obvious when facing the actual piece.

But Snyder said the virtual viewing would not detract from an actual visit to the museum. On the contrary, he said.

"It just makes your museum experience less daunting, it opens you more to what the experience can do for you," he said. "It begins to allow you to develop familiarity not just with an image but with context."

He lauded Google, which spent months mapping the museum with cameras mounted atop bicycles.

More than 30,000 high-resolution objects from museums around the world are now available for viewing, up from the original 1,000 when the project was first launched. Items can be found by location, artist, collections and more.

"Connecting the content of the world to users, that is part of our mission," said Yossi Matias, managing director of Google's R&D Center in Israel. "The resolution of these images, combined with a custom built zoom viewer, allows art lovers to discover minute aspects of paintings and other objects they may never have seen up close."

The project is just the latest in a long line of collaborations between Google and Israel. The tech giant has a large R&D center in Israel, has purchased several Israeli startups.

Google has also teamed up with Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, to make its photographs and documents interactive and searchable on the Internet. Yad Vashem also launched a YouTube channel, in collaboration with Google, with more than 400 hours of original video footage from the landmark 1961 trial of Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann.

Jewish Museums / Community Renewal
Posted on February 16, 2012 by Newsroom

Members of the Council of American Jewish Museums (CAJM) convene each February to discuss mutual interests and the development of new ideas.

When they meet in Michigan, Feb. 26-28, those discussions will introduce them to local museums and administrators with other ethnic and subject orientations.

Some 100 members from across the country will participate in the annual conference with this year's theme being "Place and Purpose: Jewish Museums and Community Renewal." Their tour schedule will include visits to the Arab American National Museum and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History among other cultural centers.

"This will be one of our most robust conferences," says Judith Margles, director of the Oregon Jewish Museum, board chairman of the council and chair of a session on the Future of New Jewish Culture.

"We always try to incorporate the complexities of the communities in which conferences are held, and we learn from those experiences. As we meet with people representing other cultures, we think of ourselves as Americans in the same profession, looking at and dealing with the same issues."

Tickets for the tours and associated programs are available to the public, also invited to view two art exhibits planned to complement the event.

Host institutions are the Janice Charach Gallery and Shalom Street at the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield, the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills and the Temple Israel Judaic & Archival Museum in West Bloomfield, all to be visited by participants who also will get to see the Detroit Institute of Arts, Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills and the Henry Ford in Dearborn.

"We've had private showings to get ready for all the visits," says Terri Stearn, director of the Janice Charach Gallery and conference host co-chair with Stephen Goldman, executive director of the Holocaust Memorial Center. "At the gallery, we're very pleased to be hosting this event for the first time."

Some 80 institutions are part of CAJM, founded in 1977 by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. The organization develops programs to train museum staff and volunteers, advocate on behalf of Jewish museums, foster a professional network and promote information exchanges.

Josh Perelman, chief curator and director of exhibitions and collections at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia, will be in Michigan to moderate a discussion on "Motor City Frontiers."

Panelists will include Graham Beal, director, president and CEO of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Lila Corwin Berman, director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University.

"We want to have a lively but serious conversation about the roles cultural institutions play in the civic health of urban space," Perelman explains. "Because of Detroit's challenges, its cultural institutions can be archetypes and incubators in driving the revitalization of the community."

Those who arrive the day before the conference begins will have a chance to visit the Motown Historical Museum (Hitsville USA) in Detroit, the studios where contemporary, far-reaching sounds were created for international audiences. Afterward, there will be a visit to a popular nightspot downtown.

The first formal day of the event includes tours to Cranbrook Art Museum as well as the JCC and Temple Israel galleries. Among the discussion topics are "Jews and American Cities"; "Collecting the Contemporary"; "Collaboration, Creativity and Community Building: Case Studies for Success in a Marketplace of Cultural Offerings"; and "Building Bridges: Museums and Schools as Partners."

The second day takes participants to the Henry Ford, Arab American National Museum and the Holocaust Memorial Center. Discussion topics include "Where the Particular Encounters the Universal: The Civil Rights Movement in Museum Education"; "Critiquing the Show"; "Curating the 21st Century"; and "The Power of Place."

The final meeting day features visits to the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and the Detroit Institute of Arts. The Margles and Perelman sessions will be featured.

"Networking is a very important part of the conference," says Goldman, who wants participants to understand that the Holocaust Center also teaches about Judaism and invites traveling exhibits. "Knowing one another helps with collaboration."

CAJM meets Sunday-Tuesday, Feb. 26-28, at various locations in the Metro area. For a complete schedule, go to www.cajm.net.

Nonmembers can join the organization and attend the entire conference for $400. Day passes are $175 and include tours and meals. To get more information and to register, call (248) 432-5579.

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.