Jewish Museum Vienna
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| Data | |
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| place | Vienna , Austria |
| opening | 1987/1993 |
| management |
Danielle Spera (Director)
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| Website | |
The Jewish Museum Vienna (company: Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Wien GmbH , abbreviation JMW ) is a museum for Jewish history , Jewish culture and Jewish religion in Austria. The museum has two buildings, the Eskeles Palace on Dorotheergasse and the Misrachi House on Judenplatz . The program of exhibitions and events deals with the past and present of Jewish culture in Austria.
history
The first Jewish Museum, founded in Vienna in 1895, was the first of its kind in the world. It was supported by the “Society for the Collection and Conservation of Art and Historical Monuments of Judaism”. The museum primarily focused on the culture and history of the Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire , especially Vienna and Galicia , while the collections of objects from Palestine more reflected the political debate about Zionism of the time.
Before the museum was able to move into the rooms of the Talmud Torah School in Malzgasse 16 in the 2nd district, Leopoldstadt , in 1913 with 3,400 objects , it had already moved several times. Immediately after the "annexation" of Austria to the German Reich by the National Socialists in 1938, the museum was closed and the objects were distributed by the Nazi state to the Museum of Ethnology , the Natural History Museum Vienna and other museums. The Natural History Museum used the new objects to design the anti-Semitic exhibition The Physical and Mental Characteristics of the Jews .
At the beginning of the 1950s, most of the inventory was returned to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG). Other objects found their way back into Jewish possession in the 1990s. On December 31, 1964, a small Jewish museum was opened in the then newly built Desider-Friedmann-Hof, 2., Tempelgasse 3, but it was hardly noticed by the public. In 1967 it was closed for renovations and never reopened.
In 1986, at the opening of the exhibition “Vienna 1900 - Art, Architecture and Design” in New York , Mayor Helmut Zilk announced the establishment of a new Jewish Museum in Vienna. The founding committee consisted of representatives from the Austrian Federal Government , the City of Vienna, the Israelite Cultural Community of Vienna, the Vienna Philharmonic , Leonard Bernstein and Helmut Zilk.
After its founding in 1988 as a GmbH under director Christian Cap, the museum was entrusted with the administration of the Max Berger Collection and the IKG Collection. The Berger Collection is one of the most outstanding Judaica collections in the world. Most of the objects come from the Habsburg monarchy. Max Berger was born in Poland in 1924 and was the only one of his family to survive the Shoah. He came to Vienna in the early 1950s. By the time he died in 1988, he had collected around 10,000 objects. The city of Vienna bought the majority of this extensive collection. After the IKG collection, the Max Berger Collection is the largest holdings in the Jewish Museum Vienna.
In 1993 the Austrian collector Martin Schlaff donated his anti-Semitic collection, which comprised around 5,000 objects and spanned a period from 1490 to 1946, to the City of Vienna.
Palais Eskeles
In 1993 the Dorotheum auction house made the Palais Eskeles in Dorotheergasse in Vienna available to the museum. Julius H. Schoeps , director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam , has been appointed director of the museum. On November 24, 1994, Paul Grosz, President of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien , opened the museum library.
Shortly afterwards, in 1995 and 1996, the Viennese architects Eichinger or Knechtl were commissioned to create more exhibition space, to enlarge the depot and to design a visitor café and a bookshop for specialist literature in the premises of Palais Eskeles. In 1998 the museum archive with its constantly growing collection of material on the history of Jewish Vienna was made accessible to the public. On October 25, 2000, the second building of the Jewish Museum opened its doors on Judenplatz on the occasion of the unveiling of the memorial for the Austrian Jewish victims of the Shoah .
Museum on Judenplatz
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The Museum am Judenplatz documents the social, cultural and religious life of Viennese Jews in the Middle Ages. It is located in the Misrachi House on Judenplatz, the former heart of the Jewish community in medieval Vienna. The exhibition space, which opened on October 25, 2000, is smaller than the one in Dorotheergasse and has been completely modernized, very bright with polished concrete elements and underground corridors that lead visitors to the foundation of the medieval synagogue, which is 4.5 meters below street level.
Over the past few years, the Museum am Judenplatz has hosted various contemporary art exhibitions with spiritual or specifically Jewish themes, such as installations by the Austrian artist Zenita Komad and several photo exhibitions, for example a photo essay by Josef Polleross about Vienna's small but thriving Jewish community.
renovation
In November 2009 the long-time ORF journalist Danielle Spera was appointed director of the museum. She took office in July 2010. In interviews at the time of her appointment, she spoke about her plans to make the museum accessible to a wider public and to create spaces in which fears and prejudices are reduced and non-Jews learn about both the traumatic past and the living present of the Jewish community in Austria should.
It was also particularly important to reach young people with the help of specific projects for schools, but also to attract more tourists.
“Much has normalized. Yet there are still enough people who have difficulty pronouncing the word Jew and our fellow Jewish citizens say it instead . I want to make the museum more public so that people can get to know Judaism better, ”said Spera in an interview. In order to do justice to the new direction of the museum, Spera declared the renovation of the premises in Dorotheergasse to be top priority immediately after taking office. The procurement of funds from official Austrian agencies as well as appeals for donations to Jewish emigrants in the USA were tackled immediately. The work, which lasted from January to October 2011, comprised the complete renovation of the technical infrastructure of the museum as well as renovations of the exhibition rooms and visitor facilities.
Hologram controversy
During the renovation work in Dorotheergasse, a set of glass holograms that showed three-dimensional depictions of everyday Jewish life in old Vienna was destroyed during dismantling. An employee of the museum photographed the destroyed holograms and sent them to blogging curators and local media. This triggered an international wave of protests and critics said that important cultural artifacts had been destroyed here. The museum responded to the allegations with the opinion of a court sworn expert who determined that the holograms could not have been dismantled or transported away without damaging them, as they had been glued around 15 years earlier. The museum also stated that a second set of these holograms, which has not yet been exhibited, exists and is in perfect condition. This will be kept in the depot for future exhibitions.
reopening
After various renovations, the museum in Dorotheergasse was reopened on October 19, 2011. In the course of the renovation work, the facade of the palace was also renewed. The purpose of the building was highlighted with the help of a large light installation by the Austrian artist Brigitte Kowanz , in which the word “museum” is projected onto the wall in Hebrew script. A bright, spacious foyer was set up on the ground floor as well as a spacious exhibition room in which the exhibition “Vienna. Jewish Museum. 21st century ”. This room also houses the “Nancy Spero - Installation of Memory” wall frescoes.
From November 2013, the new permanent exhibition “Our City! Jewish Vienna to this day ”installed 25 years after the (re) establishment of the museum and 20 years after it moved into the Palais Eskeles. The large room on the second floor is now used for events and the exhibition “Our City!”. A small exhibition “From Aleph to Tav - From Beginning to End”, which documents the Jewish life cycle using museum objects and everyday objects, is also shown on this level. The viewing depot on the second floor has also been completely rebuilt and now houses the museum's Judaica collection. There, individual objects are highlighted and explained through windows in the showcases, each window being connected to a specific location, such as the Leopoldstadt Temple, which was destroyed in 1938 . In the showcases in the middle of the room there are exhibits from Austrian and Viennese prayer houses, synagogues and other Jewish institutions, from the Jewish Museum before 1938 and to a small extent from private households. The exhibits in the side showcases focus on the period after 1945. Here you will find objects from the Judaica collection of Max Berger with an Austro-Hungarian focus, the Eli Stern collection, which mainly consists of everyday objects from Eretz Israel , and new acquisitions and donations, which document the history of the Jewish community in Vienna from 1945 to the present day. Martin Schlaff's collection of anti-Semitic objects, which can also be seen on the second floor, was positioned in the showcases in such a way that the front of the object can only be viewed through mirrors on the back walls of the showcases. This forces the viewer to deal with his own reflection at the same time.
Visitor numbers
Since its reopening, the museum has seen significantly more visits, both to regular exhibitions and to its evening events, such as book presentations, artist talks and film screenings. The number of visits to the two houses was 59,471 in 2011, and around 144,000 in 2019 (see Most visited sights in Vienna ). The Jewish Museum is currently one of the top 30 Vienna attractions.
New permanent exhibition, Ephrussi temporary exhibition
Since November 19, 2013, the Jewish Museum Vienna has been offering its visitors the new permanent exhibition: “Our City! Jewish Vienna to this day ”. The journey begins in 1945 and continues into the Jewish present in Vienna. It outlines the difficult path of a totally destroyed Jewish community, which in 1938 - seven years earlier - was still the largest German-speaking and the third largest community in Europe, up to its present manageable but extremely lively presence.
In autumn 2018, Edmund de Waal , author of the novel The Hare with the Amber Eyes , gave 170 Netsukes to the Jewish Museum Vienna on permanent loan. The small Japanese wooden figures, once the property of Viktor Ephrussi and Emmi Ephrussi in the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna , were hidden in a maid's mattress during the Nazi era. The Ephrussi family archive, rescued from Vienna in 1938, has now also been given to the museum. The museum organized a special exhibition on the Ephrussis from November 6, 2019 to April 13, 2020 .
Events
In the two event rooms 60 to 70 events take place every year: lectures, readings, book presentations, discussions, film screenings, artist talks and concerts.
Awards
- 2013 Austrian Museum Seal of Approval
- 2014 Austrian Museum Prize Appreciation Prize
- 2016 Vienna Business Tourism Prize
- 2017 Hans and Lea Grundig Prize for the exhibition “The better half. Jewish artists until 1938 "
- In 2017 the JMW voted “The Culture Trip” among the top 10 museums in Austria
- In 2018 New York Times ranked the "Comrade Jude" exhibition in the top 10 worldwide
- In 2019 the trade magazine “Judaica in the Spotlight” selected the JMW as the best Jewish museum in Europe
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ [1]
- ^ How the news anchor Danielle Spera became a museum director . July 13, 2010. Archived from the original on December 14, 2013. Retrieved March 1, 2013.
- ↑ Museologies blog . Retrieved March 23, 2014.
- ^ Massive criticism of the Jewish Museum . Retrieved March 23, 2014.
- ↑ Expert opinion: Holograms could not be removed . Retrieved March 23, 2014.
- ^ Successful restart for the Jewish Museum . Retrieved March 23, 2014.
- ↑ http://www.wienkultur.info/page.php?id=98
- ↑ http://www.jmw.at/de/exhibitions/unsere-stadt-juedisches-wien-bis-heute
- ↑ Falter (weekly newspaper) , No. 46/2018, November 14, 2018, p. 55
- ^ Culture Trip: 10 of The Best Museums In Austria. Retrieved March 9, 2020 .
- ^ Roberta Smith, Holland Cotter, Jason Farago: Best Art of 2018 . In: The New York Times . December 12, 2018, ISSN 0362-4331 ( nytimes.com [accessed March 9, 2020]).
- ↑ Post Author: admin: Top 10 Jewish Museums in Europe. July 25, 2019, accessed March 9, 2020 (UK English).
Coordinates: 48 ° 12 '26 " N , 16 ° 22' 8.5" E