Jewish Online News from Australia and New Zealand
The Jewish Museum of Australia is a community museum, which aims to explore and share the Jewish experience in Australia and benefit Australia’s diverse society.
The Jewish Museum of Australia is committed to being a respected and innovative cultural centre, recognised nationally for its excellence in exhibitions, education programs and collection management.
May 12, 2010 by Agencies
The Victorian Brumby Labor Government has announced it will provide $400,000 to the Jewish Museum of Australia to create a new gallery and an online learning portal.
Rebecca Forgasz, Lady Cowen, Sir Zelman Cowen's sister June Helmer, Tony Lupton and Minister Peter Batchelor
Arts Minister Peter Batchelor joined Member for Prahran Tony Lupton to announce the funding for the St Kilda-based museum.
“These are two exciting and transformative projects for the Jewish Museum of Australia and that’s why we are pleased to contribute $400,000,” Mr Batchelor said.
“The Zelman Cowen Gallery will provide a dynamic new centrepiece for the Museum, telling the Australian Jewish story, from the Jewish convicts who arrived on the First Fleet to the present day.
“It is a fitting tribute to Sir Zelman Cowen, a great Victorian, a pre-eminent figure in Australian Jewish life and a founding Patron of the Museum.
“The new online learning portal will make the Museum’s extensive collection and education resources accessible to a broader audience.”
Mr Batchelor said the Jewish Museum of Australia was one of the country’s leading community museums.
“The Jewish Museum of Australia is widely regarded as a leader in its field – one of the top community museums in the country and a respected and innovative cultural centre,” he said.
“It is recognised for its quality exhibitions, its dynamic education and public programs and its championing of diversity, cultural understanding and harmony.
“The redevelopment comes at an exciting time for the Jewish Museum with the appointment of a new Director, Rebecca Forgasz, who brings a fresh vision to the Museum.”
Mr Lupton, who worked closely with the museum to secure the funding, said the Brumby Labor Government had a long and proud history of support for, and partnership with, the Jewish Museum of Australia.
“This kind of ambitious project requires the commitment and support of a wide range of partners,” Mr Lupton said.
“The Jewish Museum has done a magnificent job raising funds, particularly during a time of global financial uncertainty, and the community has responded generously. It’s only appropriate that the Victorian Government plays its part too.
“We recognise the importance of celebrating and preserving the rich and diverse stories of Victoria’s communities, and promoting understanding between the many cultures and faiths that make up our State – and I commend the Jewish Museum for leading the way.
New Museum director, Rebecca Forgasz said: “The State Government’s significant contribution will enable work to move forward on curating, designing and then building the Zelman Cowen Gallery of Australian Jewish History. The Australian Jewish History Gallery is in many ways the heart of the Jewish Museum of Australia. It is what makes our Museum unique – it is the only Jewish museum in the world dedicated specifically to telling the story of Jewish settlement in Australia.
Despite the fact that Jews have been in Australia since the beginnings of white settlement, and have contributed enormously to Australian society, it is a story that is not well known – even within the Jewish community.
One of our principal aims in building the new Gallery is to create a place that will be a hub for education and discussion around issues of community, identity and civics in a multicultural society. We want to be a magnet for school students by presenting the Jewish story in new ways that are engaging and participatory, as well as relevant to current curricula. To that end we will be working to develop specific design elements and pathways that will enable children to access the exhibits and information in the gallery – something that is new for us but is very much seen as the way for Museums to move forward and develop new audiences.
“We were very sad that Sir Zelman was not well enough to be with us today, but delighted that Lady Cowen was able to represent him, along with his sister, Mrs June Helmer, one of the Founders of the Jewish Museum, and his daughter Kate Cowen.”
May 7, 2010 by Henry Benjamin
The Jewish Museum of Australia’s Australian Jewish History Gallery is to be redeveloped and will be named after former Governor-General Sir Zelman Cowen.
Next week, the Victorian Government will announce its financial contribution to the gallery which is to be known as the Zelman Cowen Gallery of Australian History.
A spokesperson for the museum told J-Wire: “The Australian Jewish History Gallery is at the heart of the museum and is unique in the world as being the only gallery in the world dedicated to capturing the Australian Jewish story from the first convicts who arrived on the First Fleet in 1788 until today.”
Rebecca Forgasz, the museum’s new director, will join members of the Cowen family at a function next week at which Victorian Cabinet Secretary and M.P. for Prahran Tony Upton will make the announcement.
April 12, 2010 by Agencies
The Jewish Museum of Australia has opened a new exhibition featuring the artwork of the inmates of the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
Ghetto Theresienstadt: Dachboden Idylle 1943 (Attic Idyll) Paul Schwarz watercolour, crayon and ink on paper Jewish Museum of Australia Collection 0272
The exhibition, Theresienstadt: Drawn from the Insider features works from the Jewish Museum of Australia Collection.
Opened by Julian Burnside, the exhibition will run for eleven months at the St Kilda museum in Melbourne .
untitled (Cobbler) 1 May, 1943 Leo Lowit Watercolour and pencil on paper
The concentration camp at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia was a macabre mock-up of a real society, a triumph of duplicity, designed to lull its inmates and the world at large into believing that it was a benign resettlement program, where Jews would be the beneficiaries of the Nazis’ humane treatment. In fact it was a way station to the death camps.
The exhibition, Theresienstadt: Drawn from the Inside: Works from the Jewish Museum of Australia Collection, showcases the watercolours and drawings of Paul Schwarz and Leo Lowit, Theresienstadt interns who were ultimately murdered in Auschwitz. Their impressions were carried out of Theresienstadt in a battered suitcase by Paul’s wife Regina, who entrusted them to the Museum. First exhibited in 1990, today the sketches and their creators remain unrepresented in any major Holocaust museum. The body of works is therefore unique, and it is timely twenty years later, to share it with the public once again.
A community of creativity was formed in the mire of suffering that was Theresienstadt by the remarkable concentration of artists, intellectuals, and musicians. Some were forced by the Nazis to produce material for the Nazi propaganda machine or for the Germans’ personal consumption. Some depicted the awful reality; some coped by idealising their environment. Neither defiance nor compliance prevented deportation to Auschwitz.
Paul Schwarz captured the intimate world of the housing barracks, secluded nooks, and little courtyards of the ghetto in almost idyllic watercolours. Leo Lowit’s unflinching material is stark and unforgiving, and sometimes ironic, in its depiction of the horror, fear and desolation in Theresienstadt.
Of the approximately 144,000 Jews sent to Theresienstadt, 17,247 survived. Only ninety-three of the15,000 children survived. This place of short stay, of death, had a prodigious output. Whether the inmates’ art and music was about survival, or about spiritual resistance, art did not finally save lives.
February 26, 2010 by Community Editor
Joint function involving Australian Friends of the Hebrew University, the Sydney Jewish Museum and Mandelbaum House.Historian Bauer will speak on “World War II as the context to the Holocaust
Sydney Jewish Museum
148 Darlinghurst Rd
$10
6:30 p.m.
March 31, 2009 by J-Wire Staff
Superheroes & Schlemiels - Jews & Comic Art
An exhibition created by the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (Paris)
In cooperation with the Joods Historisch Museum (Amsterdam)
3 May 2009 – 30 August 2009 click here to see examples of the works
The story of comics is inextricably connected to its Jewish creators. This upcoming exhibition offers the visitor a behind the scenes insight into the history and genius of comic artists who, across the years, have captured the imaginations of children and adults alike.
In 1938 Siegel and Shuster launched the iconic superhero Superman, their response to the catastrophe of that time – Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, a world heading into war and the Great Depression.
The launch on 3 May 2009 of Superheroes and Schlemiels: Jews and Comic Art, an exhibition created by the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme (Paris), licensed exclusively for exhibit to the Jewish Museum of Australia, takes a close look at the creators of the comic genre that still fires our imagination.
Superheroes & Schlemiels features reproduction and original works by: Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel (Superman), Jack Kirby and Stan Lee (Fantastic Four and X-Men), Will Eisner (The Spirit and A Contract With God), Harvey Kurtzman (MAD) and Art Spiegelman (Maus).
Also included are original never before seen works by local Australian Jewish comic artists: Nicki Greenberg, Bernard Caleo, Andrew Weldon, David Blumenstein and John Kron.
The exhibition traces comic-strip figures from 1910 to the present day. The first comic strips appeared in Yiddish and English-language newspapers. They make clear the ordeals faced by Jewish immigrants in their attempts to integrate within American society.
In the following period, around 1940, we see the emergence of the phenomenon of the American superhero in comic strips. The integration of Jews was by now well under way and various comic-strip writers focussed on the creation of superheroes with a national character.
“An important part of the exhibition is devoted to the more recent work of Will Eisner,” claims Jewish Museum temporary exhibitions curator Jess Rynderman. “With A Contract with God, Eisner was the first artist to translate his memories of Jewish history into a graphic novel. He was concerned primarily with the culture and way of life of Jewish immigrants in American society.”
The Holocaust plays an important role in the work of those Jewish comic-strip authors who became well known after Will Eisner. Maus by Art Spiegelman is now a model for graphic novels dealing with this subject matter.
So come and re-live the era of comics, of action, of fantasy. Enter another world.
Superhero:
A fictional character of unprecedented physical prowess dedicated to acts of bravery in the public interest.
Schlemiel: Yiddish, pronunciation: shla-meel
Habitual bungler; a dolt, clumsy person.
