Jewish Museums Today

By: Galia Bar Or
February 2005

Beyond the different emphases implicit in the activities of Jewish museums in different communities, it seems to me that all of them, grosso modo, have to confront the same questions that are posed by the time. A broader historical view, from the founding of the first Jewish museums about a hundred years ago, also presents a picture of a broad common denominator among the museums that were built concurrently in different countries throughout the world. It therefore seems right to me to open this discussion on Jewish museums with a focus on the points they have in common, and only then to go on to the local and specific emphases.

From its beginnings, the Jewish museum fulfilled the needs of a Jewish community that was no longer orthodox, in a period of change – a community contending with its new identity, and shaping collective cultural tools with the goal of facing the challenges of the time. Abraham Joshua Heschel, in a 1945 text (“The Land is the Lord’s”) that became a milestone, described the Jews of Eastern Europe of the world of the past as people who believed that the existence of the world depended not on museums but on synagogues and batei midrash. To them, the beit midrash was important not because the world needed it; on the contrary, the world was important because the beit midrash existed in it. Orthodox Jewry had no need of museums, and – to give a local example – Jewish museums were founded in Israel in kibbutzim that belong to various kibbutz movements with very different world-outlooks, but no art museums or Jewish museums were founded in kibbutzim of the religious kibbutz movement of orthodox Judaism, the Kibbutz Hadati. Nor have any museums been founded in the religious settlements in Judea and Samaria. There the settlers have built synagogues and batei midrash, in which preservation of memory is practiced as a living activity and as a part of everyday life.

Jewish museums were established in Europe (in Vienna in 1897, in Frankfurt and Prague in 1901, in Warsaw in 1910, in Budapest in 1920), in Russia (in St. Petersburg in 1916), in the USA (in New York in 1903) and in Eretz-Israel (in Jerusalem in 1906), in the wake of accelerated changes in the way of life of the Jews. These changes – economic, social, and cultural – took place in the wake of the Emancipation (and the Enlightenment?), with the abandonment of the religious way of life, and the integration into the surrounding non-Jewish civic society. Most of the questions that were relevant at the time of the inception of the institution of the Jewish museum were common to all the Jewish museums, and they remain relevant to this day.

The central problem, of preserving and documenting Jewish heritage, which arose in a period of radical change (similarly to the phenomenon of the founding of industrial museums in the wake of the Industrial Revolution) has remained of the essence in the present period as well. It had an acute significance in the contexts of collective memory in the period immediately after the Holocaust and the destruction of communities of Jews in Europe, but today too, with so much discontinuity in the life of many Jewish communities, there is a risk of a loss of traditions and of erasure of the past.

An additional question that was fundamental to the establishment of the Jewish museums, the need to contend with the challenge of a changing Jewish identity, and to posit collective spiritual contents for the Jewish community, is also relevant to the situation of today. For a while it seemed that this problem of Jewish identity was not relevant to Israel, where the Zionist national culture was in any case Jewish; indeed, it seemed that the Jewish people would find its complete identity in Eretz-Israel, in its renascent culture. It turns out, however, that with the gradual weakening of the “religion of the State”, the question of Jewish identity has become meaningful in Israel as well. Additional factors such as processes of privatization influence this process of weakening of a given collective identity. In the kibbutzim, for example, which developed an impressive culture of ceremonies in the life circle of the individual, group gatherings on feastdays and holidays that were based on a renaissance of national and Jewish culture, we now see a diminished identification on the part of the public, and a tendency to focus on the family framework without any concurrent creation of an alternative culture.

When the first Jewish museums were founded, Jewishness was perceived in them in its narrow definition, as only a religion and a tradition. Relatively early, however, a broader perception developed in them, which defined identity in terms of culture and art. Various thinkers in the early twentieth century considered cultural identity as a necessary condition for the definition of a people (Buber, Echad Ha’am). At the beginning, though, art works served only as illustrations. The collections of Jewish museums contained, for example, illustrations of Jewish life, portraits of important personages in the community, bible illustrations, etc.; not art per se, which was being widely practiced in the twentieth century. But with the development of Jewish museums in the ’20s and the early ’30s, the collections broadened, to contain works of contemporary art in various fields, religious implements in modern design, and collections of contemporary graphics, sculpture and painting, which from then on would become an integral part of the museum as including modern Jewish culture (such was the case, for example, in the Jewish Museum in Berlin when it opened in 1933).

As cultural institutions that were broadening their spheres of activity to contexts of living art, the Jewish museums sought to create a dialogue as an equal among equals with the institutions of high art and culture in their surroundings, and to offer Jewish artists a forum in the Jewish community (the lack of which had been felt in the past) for the complex confrontation with their dual identity, as Jews and as artists. From here on the Jewish museums were exposed to far-from-simple questions that stemmed necessarily from an engagement with culture, history and art as dynamic systems that require a complex response, which includes sensitive social and political contexts. Jewish culture, like any cultural system, does not exist in an exclusive, passive way; it frequently shapes itself through ongoing engagement with the past, with tradition, and with challenges posed by the present. It contains collective and subjective psychological sediments, and alternative forms of culture exist within it as meaningful and challenging elements.
This is the great challenge for the Jewish museum as a living institution that preserves and documents but also constitutes an active and dynamic forum – that researches, collates and interprets and in so doing posits a perspective on the past, adopts a critical approach from within the present, and orients towards a perspective of the future. A living museum has to become relevant beyond the immediate, in the broad context of the up-to-date discourse taking place in the domains of history, society, art, in all its various circles, non-Jewish as well as Jewish. Questions relating to innovative technologies of display, interactive or conventional, questions relating to strategies for attracting publics to the museum: all these have to do with the “how”, not the “what”, and a cultural institution must first of all define for itself its foci of engagement. Only if it is relevant to the world around it, and does not close itself inside an idiosyncratic bubble, will the Jewish museum be relevant to its own community too. Serious contemporary artists will seek to show their works in a Jewish museum only if activity of high quality and significance has been built in that museum, in the sense of the highest professional recognition of the institution. Committed activity at times means dealing with questions that are sensitive and arouse dispute, about which no consensus exists. A museum that engages in history, culture and art cannot be blocked off from the trends of the time; it has to train its public to also be open to “attacks” in the spheres of culture and art on what had seemed to be stable and assured in the collective identity.

In this sphere the museums have a broad field of activity, some of the contexts of which are local, offering museums in differing countries specific spheres of activity. For example, a Jewish museum in Israel has to confront a Jewish identity that to a large extent has been suppressed in the course of the Zionist endeavor to build a new society, a “new man” and a “new Jew” who, on the face of it, no longer suffers from the “anomaly of the Galut [the Diaspora]” with all its manifestations. In this context it is important, for example, to research the canon of Israeli art, the official story of this art, and to put forward alternative narratives that present other, non-dichotomous possibilities of Israeli and Jewish identity. A discussion of this kind could be developed in a temporary exhibition, in a book, or in a series of public programs and encounters, which may assist in creating a more complex collective consciousness. Discussion of an “alternative history” is important also in the context of a policy of enriching a permanent collection. A museum that engages in an alternative history will not rest content with what has been recognized in the canonical narrative with its line of heroes; it will continuously follow the work of artists who have not been recognized because their work did not suit the political spirit of the time, yet has a major relevance to the present and the future. Such a museum will collect and preserve their work and advance it to the foreground of the public discussion as an important part of the discussion of the collective consciousness.

This discussion, the context of which is on-the-face-of-it local (Israel) is an example of the dualisms entailed in questions relevant to different places, but this does not mean that the specific focus – Israeli and Jewish identity, for example, or presentation of an alternative history – is not relevant to North America as well. At times, indeed, a distanced view, or a variant presentation of the same issue, may prove fertile and enriching for the overall perspective of the discussion and the general consciousness.

Jewish museums are distinguished from one another not so much by geographical categories but rather by structural categories. For example, there is a considerable difference (if we start from the first founding of Jewish museums) between a museum built around an existing private collection and a museum constituted as a conscious community endeavor. A museum that is based on a private collection at times continues, in a known sense, the original perspective of the collection in the structure of its acquisitions, its permanent collection, and its temporary exhibitions. Thus, for example, the Mané Katz Museum in Haifa, which contains treasures of Judaica collected by the painter Mané Katz as well as his estate as an artist, at times presents temporary exhibitions of works by artists of the Jewish School of Paris who were Katz’s colleagues during his stay in Paris – a historical period that is relevant to the collection.

The Museum of Art, Ein Harod, is a rare example of a museum that was founded not on the basis of an existing collection, but by a peripheral kibbutz community that numbered no more than several hundred members. In this case the museum was established even before the completion of the settlement’s other primary needs, such as permanent residential buildings. From its outset the museum was dedicated to the preservation and documentation of Jewish art, and the collection – Judaica, painting and sculpture – was collected in the ’30s and in later years in the Jewish dispersions abroad and in Israel. It is interesting that most of the founders of the kibbutz came from Eastern Europe, from a class of artisans and small merchants, and from a religious way of life. In the places they came from they did not have the privilege of a habitus ((Bourdieu’s term for the prevalent set of socio-cultural dispositions that generate practices and perceptions) that included high art, they were not exposed to institutions such as concert halls and art museums. Many of them had undergone traumas of pogroms, were seeking a better future for humankind, and wanted to build a new society on the basis of a renascence of Jewish values integrated with socialist values.

They called the institution that they founded Mishkan LeOmanut, [Abode, or Tabernacle, of Art], and it has become an “institution” in the deep sense, fulfilling important cultural and social functions – an institution that assists the overcoming of a personal and collective trauma, a site of memory, an institution that reflects and shapes a rich and complex collective identity. For example, in this museum, which was founded by kibbutz members in the second half of the 1930s, there was no trace of the dichotomy between Israeli and Jewish identity. Its collection included a Judaica collection and works of art that document the life of the Jewish communities in Europe, as well as general modern art and Israeli art. Its temporary exhibitions included, for example, in the early ’40s, a show of items and photographs on the subject of timber synagogues in Eastern Europe. The museum’s founder and director, the local artist Haim Attar, brought this example of the timber synagogues as an exemplary model of how a community elevates itself to become capable of a collective creation that is vitally meaningful for life. The establishment of the museum at Ein Harod at such an early stage of the settlement’s establishing itself, and while it was contending with difficult physical and economic conditions, proves how vital the museum institution may become for a community that had undergone a shock of change and for whose existence questions of identity are vital.

The museum’s local context sometimes directs it to a specific mission, which later finds expression in the permanent collection. For example, in Ein Harod the museum’s entire Judaica wing will be developed (depending on financial means) from the perspective of this “kibbutz Judaica” – this fascinating, radical attempt in kibbutzim at innovating values in Judaism, which includes collective festival decorations from the ’30s through to the ’60s (items collected by the museum in recent years from all kibbutzim). This will be shown side by side with the traditional Judaica as representing an important part of the museum’s constitutive forming stages and as constituting a significant contribution to the collective memory of the Jewish people.

Every museum, like every person, has an identity of its own that is shaped by history, the landscape, the community that sustains it, the collection, and its body of activities. Even a museum that does not enjoy generous sources of finance can crystallize activities and a collection that define a distinctive identity that has a cultural significance, on any scale.

Collaboration among Jewish museums throughout the world is to my mind the imperative of the present moment, because this dialogue between the various Jewish groupings constitutes a source of spiritual enrichment and empowerment. What we have in common is inexhaustible; if we think for example that tracing the biography of any one of the Jewish artists we engage with exposes the fascinating history of Jewry in recent generations. The biography of the individual splits and coheres through events, migration, rebuilding, in the East and in the West, in Europe and in America, in Israel and in Russia, and it belongs to all of us and is relevant to all of us equally. So too the confrontation, ongoing and constantly putting on new faces, with collective traumas like the Holocaust, confrontation with the testimony of witnesses through various means but also with what surfaces in the works of the second and the third generation in the various Jewish groupings in the world. And not less important, confrontation with the concept of the “Other” in Judaism (and the “Otherness” of Judaism), in the deep historical and philosophical context and also in the topical context, and the list is long and makes possible inter-museum collaborations, in temporary exhibitions, in publications, and in activities in the community.

Fruitful collaboration begins, first of all, between individuals, and is then only backed by formal institutions. That is why this conference is so important. This is the first time that I am privileged to attend this conference, and I am grateful to its organizers for having extended its framework and included the Israeli context as well, even though there does not yet exist a corresponding forum of Jewish museums in Israel. The possibility of exchanging opinions, reservations, plans, at this conference with colleagues who engage in the same sphere and are developing agendas that have common affinities, creates a basis for future collaboration. Only by a way of building relations of trust can a bond be woven that makes it possible to share problems, develop reciprocal interest in one another’s worlds, create fruitful common platforms, and contend together with acute questions common to us all.

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