Germany: Berlin Jewish Museum to Keep Growing with New Libeskind Designed Addition

Berlin, Germany. Jewish Museum. Photos: Samuel D. Gruber, 2003.

Germany: Berlin Jewish Museum to Keep Growing with New Libeskind-Designed Addition

The Berlin Jewish Museum unveiled plans in mid-May for an expansion to be completed by the fall of 2011. The new facility, located across from the current site on Lindenstrasse will be designed by Daniel Libeskind, architect of the Museum's original zig-zag building which opened in 2001. Since then there have been more than six million visits to the museum, with 750,000 visiting in 2009. During the past decade the Museum has increased it programmatic, educational and archival offerings requiring more space.

The Jewish Museum consists of two buildings, the Kollegienhaus, a former Baroque Prussian courthouse which was originally the Berlin City Museum to which the first Libeskind building was added, connected by underground passageways. A few years ago the Museum built the glass courtyard, also designed by Libeskind, between the rear wings of the Baroque building to serve as a venue for large gathering and events.

Berlin, Germany. Jewish Museum. Photos: Samuel D. Gruber, 2003.

The 10-million-euro (12.7-million-dollar) extension will consist of the conversion of a large existing warehouse currently housing a flower market, to which will be added three cubes for entrance, library and auditorium.

Germany: Munich Liberal Congregation Says Libeskind will Design New Synagogue

Germany: Munich Liberal Congregation Says Libeskind will Design New Synagogue
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) The German news service Deutsche Welle has written that Munich’s Liberal congregation, Beth Shalom, has engaged Berlin-Museum designer Daniel Libeskind to design a new synagogue. The Liberal congregation, affiliated with the World Union for Progressive Judaism, is not included within the formal structure of Munich’s government-recognized Jewish Religious Community (Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde München und Oberbayern). Prior to the Second World War and the Holocaust, Munich has a large Liberal community housed in the large 1887 Romanesque/Gothic-style synagogue in the Herzog-Max-Strasse, demolished beginning on June 9, 1938, several months before Kristallnacht, when the city's Orthodox synagogue, Ohel Jakob, was also destroyed.

Beth Shalom, which claims to have 250 members does not have funding for the new building, which in this uncertain economy will be more difficult than even to support. Still, there is widespread interest in Liberal Judaism in Germany, and dissatisfaction with the current system that give property resources and government assistance only to Orthodox groups – this despite the fact that the majority of Jews in Germany today, whether descendants of Holocaust survivors or more recent arrivals from the FSU, do not follow Orthodox observance, and many are hardly practicing Jews at all.

Just a few years ago Munich dedicated a monumental educational, religious and ceremonial center designed by acclaimed German architects Wandel Hoefer Lorch and erected at Sankt-Jakobs-Platz. The new synagogue, named Ohel Jakob after its destroyed predecessor, is part of a complex the includes the (state-run) Jewish Museum and Jewish community center. Even while the synagogue was being constructed, however, there were questions about the real need for the building. After all, most of Munich Orthodox Jews already had their synagogues in their residential neighborhoods, too far from the new synagogue to walk; while many of Munich’s younger and newly-arrived Jews, especially women, resented the arrangement of the new space which separate men and women, and they vowed not to attend. The Orthodox congregation had been using the small pre-war Reichenbachstrasse Synagogue, an elegant modern building in the rear of the Community headquarters (suggestions at the time of the opening of the new complex that the liberal community be allowed use of this historic and already existing building were rejected - I have not heard of any subsequent negotiations).

Now the announcement of the Libeskind synagogue is a clear challenge – on architectural as well as religious grounds – to the established Jewish community structure. To my knowledge, only in Berlin has an accommodation between Orthodox and Liberals been made. On the one hand this seems shocking considering the Jewish pluralism of Germany before the Holocaust (after all the Munich's Liberal Synagogue was recognized as the "main Synagogue." Liberal Judaism was born and developed in Germany in the 19th century. But the rivalries make sense when one remembers the long history of Jewish religious-cultural wars that go back to Hellenistic times, and were part of a very Jewish 19th-century version Sturm und Drang across Europe.

At least in Germany for the most part many of the “so-called” Orthodox and “so-called” Liberal Jews have few real lifestyle differences between them, and they regularly associate outside the synagogue. After all, their common experience as Jews in Germany should outweigh any differences.

It will, of course, be interesting to see what Libeskind comes up with for a synagogue. He has never designed one before, and his signature elements of spatial disorientation and attenuation, irregular angles and spaces and a willingness to upset convention rather than refine it, certainly go against what most congregations are looking for in a worship, community and education space. However, if Libeskind can let go his more recent design bombast and recapture the emotional intensity and intimacy of his Felix Nussbaum Musuem in Osnabruck, he may succeed. But modesty in Libeskind may not be what the congregation is after - certainly not if by 2018 Germany Liberal Jews are flexing their membership muscles.

Germany: 5 Millionth Visitor to Berlin Jewish Museum

Germany: 5 Millionth Visitor to Berlin Jewish Museum

by Samuel D. Gruber

Ruth Ellen Gruber writes on her blog that the Jewish Museum in Berlin has received its 5 millionth visitor since the museum opened in September 2001. Ruth writes “even before its formal opening, the empty building was a tourist draw because of its distinctive design by Daniel Libeskind."

"According to the Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel, the museum is the fifth most popular museum in Berlin, with 733,000 visitors in 2007 -- including 140,000 under the age of 18. (The Pergamon Museum holds the top spot with 1.3 million visitors). About two-thirds of visitors to the Jewish Museum come from outside of Germany.

The Museum is many things to many people. For some, it remains the most compelling Holocaust monument in Germany, and there remain many (sometimes I can be counted among them) who wish the building had remained empty as a memorial and that the Peter Eisenman-designed monument had not been built. Indeed, a good number of those 5 million visitors came to the building even before the museum was installed. Most of the time I wish, as do many visitors and staff, that the Libeskind design could have been more accommodating to the musuem exhibits. I have not visited the Museum for several years, but my overall impression was of a permanent exhibit that was contorted and disjointed, in large part because of the difficult spaces in which it was forced. But that too was the result of an unclear and uncertain story line. Whose Jews to commemorate. Berlin's or Germany's or Europe's? What history? Big cities or small towns? Rabbis or cafe raconteurs? What was important - history or art? Originals or replicas? I know that the staff has been trying hard for years to work all of this out. I hope on my next visit to Germany to have time to revisit and reconsider. As for the Libeskind space, in the end the staff's best efforts will have be confined to the more traditional exhibition spaces of the old History Museum, rather than the expressive and haunting spaces of the Zigzag.

Libeskind's type of space worked well in Osnabruck, where a small number of works by Felix Nussbaum are given lots of space, and the architecture is part of the narrative. To me, this small space remains Libeskind's most successful work. It is appropriately disconcerting and disorienting, but somehow remains humane. Like Berlin, Libeskind's Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England is difficult to navigate, but the disorientation there is in part due to murky lighting and unnecessary special effects, that for me undermined both architecture and exhibitions. At Manchester, the best experience was actually the liberating one of climbing on the outside of the building. I look forward to a trip to San Francisco, to see what musuem curators have to confront with there.

photos of the Jewish Museum in Berlin by Samuel D. Gruber (2003).