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Artist’s impression of the Jewish Museum’s new Holocaust exhibition space
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Heritage art that packs a punch
The Jewish Museum, home to a collection of religious artworks of national
MUSEUMS often have a dusty reputation, but with ghetto boxers and Einstein’s flights of imagination hogging its walls, Camden Town’s Jewish Museum is rather different.
The museum in Albert Street, which shuts its doors next month for a multi-million pound renovation project, fixes its focus on the cultural experiences and lives through the ages of one of the oldest surviving tribes, the Jews.
On September 2, the museum will close for 18 months, leaving its celebrated current exhibition on Minority Boxers in Britain and a collection of religious art of “outstanding national importance” to gather dust until its grand-scale re-opening in 2009.
Richie Burman, director of the Jewish Museum, said the founding of the museum in Bloomsbury in 1932 had been born out of a “core concern about education”.
Ms Burman said: “It was vitally important to improve British people’s understanding of Jewish society. We have always tried to reach out to the widest possible audiences, to preserve the Jewish history and heritage and to challenge stereotypes and combat prejudices.”
The museum moved to Albert Street in the late 1980s and has been twinned with The Museum of Jewish Life, situated in Finchley, since 1995. Recent exhibitions have featured the remarkable story of the Ugandan Jews, cruelly oppressed by dictator Idi Amin in the 1970s, who now number just 700; an exploration of the significance of Passover and a personal look at the life of the great Jewish physicist Albert Einstein.
The current exhibition, which runs until the museum closes, focuses on the tough world of minority boxers, and the impact they had on challenging the stereotypes of their times, from the 19th century pugalist Daniel Mendoza (reputed to be the “most scientific boxer ever known”) right up to today’s Amir Khan. |
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