The Arts in New York City

The museum of Jewish Heritage is located in the Battery Park neighborhood of Manhattan. The museum is relatively new, only 10 years old, and looks very modern from the outside. I have been to this museum once before, at age 12, but I don’t remember my experience there very well. This museum was particularly attractive to me because of my Jewish background. In attending this exhibit, I expected to learn more my heritage and culture. The sections of the museum that were worth viewing were the ‘Jewish life’ section and the ‘Holocaust’ section.
This museum didn’t just tell a story, it showed it. The exhibit on Jewish life a century ago had artifacts and memorabilia from everyday families. Some of the objects shown were silverware and holy books. There were also photographs from weddings, bar mitzvahs and births. To go along with these pictures was an actual dress that a woman wore at her wedding. These photographs and artifacts were of deep sentimental value for all of these people and just seeing them on display made you feel what it was like to walk in their shoes. This display was about Jews from all walks of life in both America and Europe. The displays on the walls all only told half the story. To get the full view, videos were shown of people giving the accounts of there own experiences of life as they saw it before the Second World War. Another video was about the Jewish writers, music producers and movie stars of the time and their impact on society. Several of the people featured included Franz Kafka, Ira Gershwin, and Irving Berlin.
The most moving exhibit in the entire museum was about the Holocaust. A whole floor was dedicated to this topic and rightfully so. The city of New York has no specific museum about the Holocaust, so this exhibit is the closest we can get. This wing of the museum is structured like a story, beginning in 1933 with the rise of Adolph Hitler in Germany. Mostly pictures and clippings from Nazi propaganda were used to show the discrimination that Jews suffered in the years following. Here also, there were videos of survivors giving their eyewitness accounts of the experiences that they went through. As you progressed through this exhibit, the story unraveled as World War II began and the Nazi spread their power over Europe and created their concentration camps. To further illustrate what was being shown, artifacts from the time were used. The most significant ones that I saw were a uniform from a concentration camp and letters that people wrote while in the ghetto. In order to show the human face of the Holocaust the museum’s creators installed a special section were they put the names and pictures of 2000 people sent to Auschwitz. Each picture was meant to tell its own story.
At first glance the Jewish Heritage museum might have been something a person could learn about in a history class. However this museum didn’t just show facts in a meaningless format. Instead it tried to bring to life the story of the Jewish people and the suffering that they faced. Especially at such a challenging time, when many people are still ignorant about the past, this museum serves the important purpose of preservation of events long gone. Unfortunately many of the people in the museum were older people who probably already knew about everything that was being displayed. Instead it should be the younger generation that is absorbing this material. I would recommend this museum to them; the young people who don’t know enough about the past but wish to expand their horizons.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 1:25 am and is filed under Alexander Romov, WRITING ASSIGNMENTS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.