The Libeskind-designed Jewish Museum Berlin, to the left of the old Kollegienhaus (before 2005); photo Wikipedia.
By Liam Hoare
There is no bigger event this month – indeed, this year – in terms of Jewish life in Europe than the unveiling of the $55 million core exhibition of the History of the Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw today (October 28).
The culmination of almost twenty years of work – the project having its origins in the early 1990s – the exhibit will convey a thousand years of Jewish life in Poland, interactively, within a 43,000-square-foot space. It will after its opening become, as I have previously written, a point of light, wisdom, and reflection in a country that will forever be associated with the midnight of the twentieth century and the great catastrophe of Jewish history.
For that reason, the museum is significant in and of itself. But far more interesting, perhaps, is not what it means for Poland to have a museum of Jewish life in Poland (which was, after all, a axis within Jewish Europe for hundreds of years up until the Holocaust) but what it means for Europe as a whole. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews is one part of an ongoing, modern trend in Europe: the museumification of Jewish life.
Notwithstanding the present challenges to Jewish life, Europe remains home to a rich and diverse Diaspora culture, including centers of Jewish revival. But the Holocaust was the conclusion of Judaism as a ubiquitous presence in Europe. In 1933, 9.5 million Jews lived in Europe, making up 1.7% of the continent’s population. Jews constituted almost 10 percent of the population of Poland, 5 percent in the Baltic states. Today, there are 1.1 million Jews living in Europe (1.4 million, if the former Soviet Union is included).
Jewish communities themselves, thus, are shrunken, but in the course of the last twenty years the cultural presence of Judaism in European cities can be said to have expanded, through the museumification of Judaism. The presence of Judaism is larger than Judaism itself. As Ruth Ellen Gruber observed in her study, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe, Jewish heritage having been “marginalized, repressed, or forgotten” for decades hence the Second World War, the late 1980s onwards has seen increased recognition of Judaism, Jews, the Holocaust, and Israel as part of the European experience.
For example: the Irish Jewish Museum was opened in 1985 by then-President of Israel Chaim Herzog. On the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main opened on November 9, 1988. In 1988, Jüdische Museum der Stadt Wien GmbH was established, the founding company for a new Jewish museum in Vienna. And, it was in the late 1980s, too, that the city government in Berlin announced its intention to found a new Jewish museum.
More than any other, the Jüdisches Museum Berlin has changed common understanding of what the museumification of Judaism can do for Jewish life itself. It put an end to the tendency to clad Jewish museums in the non-descript, to turn the music down and shy away lest too much attention be attracted. Designed [by Daniel Libeskind] in a bold, deconstructivist style, with sharp edges, marked lines, with imposing edifices clad in grey steel, it is a building that in no way apologizes for itself. It isn’t meek. It cannot be avoided. It must be seen.
It is, moreover, a decidedly Jewish building. The main structure is shaped as a Star of David pulled apart and stretched at its joints, in order to create a jagged and disorientating route through the museum, one which emphasizes the contours and junctures, breaks and schisms in the Jewish story. The zigs and zags in the structure in turns create voids, spaces for what is missing. Libeskind has said of the Jüdisches Museum Berlin:
The new design was based on three conception that formed the museum’s foundation: first, the impossibility of understanding the history of Berlin without understanding the enormous intellectual, economic and cultural contribution made by the Jewish citizens of Berlin, second, the necessity to integrate physically and spiritually the meaning of the Holocaust into the consciousness and memory of the city of Berlin. Third, that only through the acknowledgement and incorporation of this erasure and void of Jewish life in Berlin, can the history of Berlin and Europe have a human future.
The success of Libeskind’s Berlin museum was the catalyst for a new wave of constructions and renovations across the continent. Libeskind utilized the complexity and perplexity present in the design of the Jüdisches Museum Berlin for the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen, opened in June 2004. The freestanding cube structure housing the Jewish Museum Munich opened in March 2007. The Jewish museums in Amsterdam, London, and Vienna all underwent major rejuvenations and reconfigurations during the 2000s; Macedonia unveiled its Holocaust Memorial Center in 2011. The Museum of the History of Polish Jews in the next chapter in this story.
“Jewish museums, which often serve as anchors for broader Jewish tourism itineraries, are among the most significant tools with which Europeans seek to ‘fill in the blanks’ regarding the Jewish phenomenon,” Ruth Ellen Gruber writes. “As institutions that can easily be visited by the public, Jewish museums play an educational role that is of particular importance. They often become the public face of Judaism.” Indeed, in the absence of Jews, and therefore the absence of Judaism, the Jewish museums of Europe have become the new temples.
Of course, the potential pitfall of this museumification of Judaism in Europe is evident. As the fragments and shards of Jewish life are accumulated and curated, and above all centralized having been displaced and removed from their original homes, these Jewish museums become repositories of memory. They become houses of memory, or in the case of magnificent constructions like the museums of Berlin and Warsaw, palaces of memory.
But palaces of memory, museums, are by their very nature inert. They are a collation of life, or the elements of life, but they are alive themselves. Rather, they are spaces to be interacted with, to be engaged with, to be challenged by. Palaces of memory, in order to come to life, have to be understood, appreciated, indeed even loved.
The proliferation of Jewish museums in Europe has been met by a demand to visit them. The Jewish Museum in Prague has been, consistency over the course of several years, the most frequented museum in the Czech Republic, attracting between 500,000 and 600,000 per annum. In the first ten years after the Jewish Museum Berlin opened to the public, it received over 7.2 million visitors, include 760,000 in 2010.
In Prague and in Berlin, in London and in Amsterdam, visiting a Jewish museum, then, is not a niche interest, the preserve of Judeophiles on the one hand and those in search of the remains of a destroyed past on the other. Visiting a Jewish museum has become a regular and necessary part, an entirely normal part, of any visit to the great centers of Europe. What the museumification of Jewish life has done, therefore, is help bring down the wall of separation which exists, existed, between Jewish history and the histories of our cities, between Judaism and common culture.
Through these museums, Jewish history has become fully absorbed into the narrative of European history. Jewish history is European history, and the other way around.
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The part of your article that focuses on the architecture of the museums discusses only their physicality and mentions them as palaces of memory. I wonder about their internal atmosphere and contents. I have not visited any European museums in the past few decades outside of Prague and Terezin. I have not even been to Beit Hatfutsot in 15 years. Hopefully it has changed. However, I recall that at my last visit, Beit Hatfutsot was dark and had no real artifacts. It came across as a memorial to a dead Diaspora, presumably a Zionist reflection. In contrast, the Tel Aviv University synagogue nearby featured real artifacts from the collection of Al Moldovan, and it was well-lit by the sun and internal lighting. The impression at the synagogue gallery was that the Diaspora is home to a living, even thriving, people. I wonder what impression is manifested by the internal atmosphere and artifacts of the European Jewish museums. Do they give the impression that Longfellow had in Newport? “How strange it seems! These Hebrews in their graves,…And the dead nations never rise again.”
For a different perspective, read what Arnie Eisen, Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America had to say after visiting the core exhibition of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. http://tinyurl.com/merkpth It is 12 years since “Virtually Jewish” appeared. The time has arrived for actually Jewish. Come to Warsaw, see for yourself, make up your own mind – not only about museums of Jewish history but also about Jewish life. Here is Eisen’s blog post.
Betting on Hope
October 30th, 2014
It’s not often that a museum makes history as well as chronicles it, and rare too when otherwise cautious observers, chastened by the repeated experience of expectations gone awry, remark at the opening of a new museum that it may prove a source of hope and pride that propels an entire society forward. Both of those things happened this week in Warsaw, with the opening of Polin: The Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the stunning museum erected on the site of the ghetto where, 70 years ago, Jewish history seemed to come to an end. I travelled to Poland for the event, as did Reuven Rivlin, the new president of the State of Israel, and hundreds of other Jewish leaders, scholars, and activists from around the world, including several members of the Jewish Theological Seminary family. The occasion was not only moving but portentous. A once-ravaged and much-reduced Jewish community, and a long-suffering country far from innocent in the suffering of its Jews, had come together for a moment, in a joint project of ambition and consequence. The two seemed to be grasping—simultaneously and together—at new life. I wanted to be there to cheer them on.
The museum’s opening has received enormous press coverage, both in Jewish and non-Jewish media. I will therefore say little about the building itself (placid, graceful, light-filled, and dramatic without a hint of pretentiousness) or its creative engagement of visitors through ingenious storytelling, state-of-the-art technology, and—in the galleries devoted to the modern period—utterly riveting photography and film. I went through the 43,000 square-foot core exhibition from start to finish three times, and would happily return to spend entire days in the sections devoted to the shtetl and yeshiva; the inter-war years; and the tragic, ambiguous tale of Jews in post-war Poland, to which the museum has added another chapter. The years of Nazism and the Holocaust are captured with power and restraint, I think, neither overshadowing all that precedes them nor downplaying the magnitude and horror of the Shoah. Anyone who has ever taught a class will marvel at the thoughtfulness and consistent high quality of the museum’s “lesson plans.” Teachers of Jewish history will likely take special note of the pedagogy on view. The museum owns few items from the past: its point is not to preserve and display objects, but to tell a story that it wants its visitors to carry forward.
That objective struck me forcibly again and again. Committed Jews have far more at stake in the telling of Jewish history on this site than mere recital of facts and dates. Poles committed to the rebirth of their country as a liberal democracy in the heart of Europe likewise have much at stake in the recognition that Jews have long played a major role in their history and must be welcomed now if the current experiment is to succeed. Polish Jews perhaps have the most at stake, betting with their lives that their community has a future, despite the recent past of Holocaust and Communism, and in the face of anti-Semitism that has not entirely disappeared. They hope to build on a thousand years of life that was far more than persecution, including centuries of real cultural and economic flowering, as basis for renewed achievement.
I was hard-pressed to remain unmoved by this effort, which speaks through gallery after gallery of the core exhibition, and I doubt that Polish visitors will be able to preserve distance either. The Jews who walked through the museum with me wiped back tears and commented about how much the experience meant to them. Words such as “exhibits” or “galleries,” which connote viewing a spectacle apart from oneself, do not capture the emotion elicited by the place. This is true even as one admires the exquisite craftsmanship in evidence throughout and nowhere more visible than in the already famous reproduction (at 80 percent scale) of the wooden synagogue of Gwozdziec. Its gorgeous colors and zodiac designs held me for long moments. I did not want to move. The museum’s curators have made it the literal centerpiece of the story they tell: halfway point on a march through Jewish history and perhaps a pointer, in a way only time will reveal, to the future of that history.
This is the point at which I want to pause as well. JTS, to my mind, represents a similar commitment to building a vibrant Jewish future by reaching deep, again and again, into the Jewish past. We too disdain mere nostalgia for the past, because rosy pictures of what was allegedly easy and nice will not help us navigate conditions that, like all human conditions, and certainly all Jewish situations, are difficult and complex. We prefer engagement, critical inquiry, conservation, and transformation aimed at giving the past new vitality. Like the new museum in Warsaw, JTS rejects the picture of Jewish history as entirely one of suffering and loss, and has no interest in elegiac approaches that consign Jewish history to a past that makes no claim on you and me, here and now. At JTS we feel that claim and act on it every day. We take the past seriously enough to understand its complexity, challenge its assumptions, and dare to change its rules.
I confess I felt the claim of the Gwozdziec Synagogue and of the house of study attached to it most keenly. (So did JTS Professor David Roskies, who like me sat long in that exhibit and kept returning to it, notebook in hand.) How could we not? The synagogue’s soaring but fragile wooden roof made me feel privileged to serve the same God, and be part of the same people, as the Jews who inhabited the original. I carry their path forward, with a comparable mixture of love, self-concern, anxiety, and imperfection. History is the story of change, of course, and the move from gallery to gallery, and within galleries, drove home the fact of change for me better than any lecture on the subject. No differences are denied at Polin, and no conflicts pampered-over. But these are my ancestors, I kept thinking to myself. My history has been shaped by theirs in ways too numerous to count. By bringing their story to life with such care and quality, the museum had brought those Jews home to me—and me to them. I am grateful for that.
At Tuesday’s opening ceremony, held on the plaza outside the museum, the theme of continuity with the past, along with marked contrast from it, was paramount. The presidents of Israel and Poland together, flanked by a Polish honor guard and numerous members of the Polish and Israeli security forces, laid wreaths at the monument honoring the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. As if that symbolism were not powerful enough, the Polish president, Bronis?aw Komorowski, then confronted the horrors of so much Jewish history on his soil and the complicity of Polish bystanders to the Nazi murders, while also paying tribute to Poles who had risked and lost their lives while protecting Jews. He also cited the interdependence of Jewish and Polish cultural achievement over the centuries, and pointed out that only in a free Poland, resolutely committed to democracy, to the West, and to Israel, could this museum have been dreamed or built. (It represents an unusual partnership among private donors and foundations, the government of Poland, and the city of Warsaw.) Marian Turski of Polin’s Museum Council quoted the refrain of Zog Nit Keynmol: Hymn of the Jewish Partisans over and over again: “We are here!” (“Mir zaynen do!”). He himself had survived Auschwitz and then Communism. Now he was presiding over a museum that contained that past—his personal past, his people’s past—inside the larger frames of the thousand years of Jewish life that preceded it and of this ceremony, taking place on the site of the ghetto uprising, with the participation of the president of the reborn State of Israel. Jews and Poles, Jewish and non-Jewish Poles, had partnered in mutual hope carefully poured into concrete and glass. Amazing things do happen sometimes.
I too have a personal, though far less substantial, connection to the museum: my friend Tad Taube, a longtime supporter of the Jewish Studies program at Stanford University and now a supporter of JTS, worked and dreamed tirelessly for about 20 years to bring the museum into being. The opening was a personal triumph for Tad, and I wanted to be there with him. But to me the museum seems the fulfillment of another prayer, said by Jews repeatedly during the High Holidays: Zochreinu L’Chaim (Remember Us for Life). Jews address that prayer to God when we recite it in shul. During my three days of visits to the museum, I heard in my head the voices of Polish Jews from centuries past, including those who lived and fought in the ghetto, directing those words at us—and I heard Jews and Poles directing the prayer to one another. So many people have told me over the years that it is folly to invest in the future of Poland or its Jewish community, and many more have told me that it is folly to invest in the future of non-Orthodox Jews and Judaism in America. Wrong on both counts, I believe. We Jews remember for life, live through memory, and—at our best, with God’s help—transmute memory into life. We bet repeatedly on a future that breaks with, as well as continues the past, and sometimes that bet succeeds.
Tuesday’s gathering in Warsaw gave voice to a silent resolve to give hope a chance once more.
I think that this museum should serve as a gesture of good faith toward Jews from Poles. However I as an American with Polish roots do not see any future between Poles and Jews if there is no similarly strong gesture coming from Jews to Poles. There was no Polish “complicity” with the German Nazis in the Holocaust. Poles went through Holocaust no matter how Jews prefer to name it. If this is not finally acknowledged and honored by Jews it is my opinion that this museum will become the deepest point of contention. I do not see any signs of the desire of reconciliation coming from Jews other than demands and entitlement. I think Jews have a chance to change the course of Polish-Jewish history and it is up to them if they treat it seriously.