Future includes home of its own for Oregon Jewish Museum
By Polina Olsen
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When Rabbi Joshua Stampfer addressed the Oregon Jewish Museum Annual Meeting on June 16, he recalled Israel’s miraculous accomplishments over just 60 years. Who would have thought Jews would have a home of their own only 50 years after Theodore Hertzl’s 1897 prediction? It was, Stampfer said, because “if you really will it, if you have the determination, if you have the intense desire—it’s not a dream.”
Likewise, Stampfer said, with determination OJM will one day have a home of its own. Toward that end, guest speaker Rhoda Rosen followed with “Re-envisioning the Jewish Museum in the 21st Century.” She discussed her experience as director of Chicago’s Jewish museum.
In 2007, the Spertus Museum, along with the library and graduate school, moved to a magnificently designed glass tower built just for them on the empty lot next-door to the previous site. With the new architecture, Rosen explained, came the ability to change the nature and experience of the museum.
“What this facility has given us above all is the ability to serve multiple audiences in new ways,” Rosen said. “In the museum, our ambition is two-fold: first, to bring programming of our collection and changing exhibitions to an expanding audience and to celebrate challenge and provoke our audience to think about self-representation; second, to create a research hub.”
Rosen brought up a slide of the permanent exhibit, also known as the Open Depot. Colorful objects stacked the high, maybe floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall glass case. “You can see that objects back up on one another,” she said. “They’re high; they’re low; they’re not labeled because they’re like in storage.”
“What you see in one unit and in one theme could be in another unit describing a different story,” Rosen said. She pointed out objects in the Holocaust section that were also part of the area called Chicago Immigrants. “That is the essence of what we do at Spertus—the idea that an object doesn’t tell one story. It tells many stories so you can access it at the point you want to access it.” (Rather like three-dimensional hyperlinks or exploring Grandma’s attic treasures, one audience member later commented to the Jewish Review.)
“In a post 9/11 world, we insisted on an open light-filled space without a little straight line between Jewish symbol and architecture,” Rosen added noting some of the 152,000 square feet was sacrificed to create an atrium.
Traditional buildings, Rosen said, are like a layered cake. You could think it was dead on the first floor at the same time 700 people were on the second. At Spertus, people can look up and see the permanent exhibit, the library or the kosher café.
“So, whatever brought you in, you get a sense that there’s something else,” Rosen said. “That energy was really important to us.”
Rosen explored the challenge of a culturally specific museum in the 21st century including people’s changing sense of identity.
“Jews are looking for spaces in which they can be Jewish but also other things,” she said. “Jewish identity is one of many ways in which they identify.”
Rosen emphasized the importance of attracting young people and programming for the future.
“There’s a lot of expectations the audience has for what a Jewish museum should be that pre-determine and make it difficult to change perception,” she said. “We program for the future, we don’t program for now and we have to keep our eye on that prize.”