MUSEUM OF JEWISH HERITAGE - A LIVING MEMORIAL TO THE HOLOCAUST FACT SHEET
Mission: The mission of the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is to educate people of all ages and backgrounds about 20th century Jewish history, before, during and after the Holocaust.
Location: 36 Battery Place, Battery Park City, Manhattan.
Opening dates: Museum - September 15, 1997; Robert M. Morgenthau Wing - September 15, 2003.
Leadership: Robert M. Morgenthau, Chairman of the Board; George Klein, Manfred Ohrenstein and Howard J. Rubenstein, Vice Chairmen; and David G. Marwell, Director.
Architecture: The 30,000-square-foot Museum's symbolic six-sided shape and tiered roof is a reminder of the six million who perished in the Holocaust, as well as the Star of David. The steeped louvered roof rises 85 feet in the air. Architect: Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates.
The 82,000-square-foot, four-story Robert M. Morgenthau Wing contains a state-of-the-art theater, Edmond J. Safra Hall, suitable for films, lectures and performances; a memorial garden, Garden of Stones, designed by Andy Goldsworthy; classrooms; a resource center and library; expanded gallery space for special exhibitions; offices; café; event hall rentable for private use. Architect: Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates.
Core Exhibition: The Museum is organized around three basic themes: Jewish Life a Century Ago; The War Against the Jews; Jewish Renewal. The exhibition was designed by the Washington firm of Douglas/Gallagher. More than 2,000 photographs and 800 historical and cultural artifacts convey the Jewish experience from the 1880's to the present. Shown throughout the exhibits, twenty-four original documentary films, produced by Rainmaker Productions of New York, chronicle the memories of survivors and include testimonies from Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.
Click here to read an excerpt about the museum from Jewish Museums of the World. Click here to see a selection of PHSCologram images and related materials.
In the final, skylit gallery stands a Torah scroll plundered by the Nazis from a small Czech town and rescued by British Jews, who donated it to the museum. "It's here as a memorial symbol," says [David] Altshuler, [director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage]. "It represents all three floors." Surrounding it are "PHSColograms"-computer-generated three-dimensional photographs resembling holograms-that are montaged representations of items in the collections. "We're asking people to sit down and reflect on their journey," says Altshuler. "Not as a linear experience but as a collage. People aren't going to remember 800 objects. The way your mind works is that you often see things in different layers."
Here, it seems the museum has succumbed to technological imperative. Altshuler claims the PHSCologramic images are not replicas or facsimilies. "Rather," he explains, "we re-present."
Robin Cembalest
"design: The Many Faces of Memory"
ARTnews December 1997
" . . . and follows some intriguing modern religious art with a display of what are called PHSColograms, an acronym for photography, holography, sculpture and computer graphics-3D enhanced images of items already seen in the museum."
Eve Zibart
"A Light in the Darkness"
Washington Post
February 8, 1998
"I just went to the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the Holocaust in Mahattan and it was driven home to me that almost all of the state sponsored atrocities of the 20th century occurred with either the complicity and/or awareness of the world's governments. Before and during World War II the Allied governments tightened quotas on Jewish immigration, thus leaving most of the Jews in western and eastern Europe with nowhere to go. Whenever we're aware of a despotic regime victimizing a segment of its population, we are all to some extent responsible. We've known about atrocities as they were being carried out and done little or nothing to intervene. As compassionate citizens we need to be adamantly intolerant of regimes that openly and intentionally victimize segments of their populations. Institutional racism, prejudice, homophobia, antisemitism, and hate of any kind, are, at the risk of sounding absolutist, always intolerable. And we need to make sure that our elected representatives do their utmost to make the world an unsafe place for despots, demagogues, and all those officials who preach and carry out hate and violence."
Moby
Lyric notes from Play, 1999
["Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad"]
