Blogerim

10 April, 1946 – 9 August, 2012

Ronny Loewy (in the middle) with the director Louis Malle (r.) and Daniel Cohn-Bendit (l.) at the German premiere of “Au revoir les enfants,” 1987, courtesy of Gisela Geier-Loewy

On August 9 of last year, film historian Ronny Loewy died. He was a remarkable person and a friend of this museum, who supported and inspired our work from the beginning: it was Ronny who selected many of the film excerpts that appear in our permanent exhibition or appeared in the special exhibition “Home and Exile”. He also published, among other things, Tereska Torrès’s film diary Unerschrocken: Auf dem Weg nach Palästina (Unafraid: On the Way to Palestine) about the illegal emigration of Displaced Persons to Palestine in 1947 and 48. Ronny was a colleague and friend, with whom we not only worked but also shared many experiences and much laughter, who constantly opened our eyes to the new and unusual, the forgotten and overlooked, little details from films, and above all to the people behind these moving pictures.

We therefore wish to dedicate space on this blog today to remembering him and his life, one year after his death: → continue reading

We have been nudged, with some pizzazz, into a situation of good luck: at last we have an open-access library. After various construction delays, we finally had a date set to move. We were supposed to be transferring from our secluded rooms on the third floor of the Libeskind Building to the new Academy Building across the street from the museum, also built by Daniel Libeskind.

Reading room of the library and the archive at the Academy of the Jewish Museum Berlin
© Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Mirjam Bitter

While some of us were directing the book-packers in the warehouse, others were confronting the question of how to set up this new reading room with open access. Visitors would at last be able to come and go without signing in. Missing shelf labels needed to be replaced with makeshift printouts from our classification system. Information about our opening hours had to be hung at the entrance. In addition, the transport needed to be organized of rare materials from the warehouse across the street to the new reading room. On top of all this, we could not lose track, in the midst of the moving boxes, of a set of packages containing an extensive new donation to our collection. When we finally opened our doors, we learned that there would be a press event: → continue reading

From the In-Box of the Blog Editorial

Luckily, this blog receives anti-Semitic comments only rarely. When the case arises, we, the moderators, ask ourselves – as we do with all comments – whether we should publish them and make them visible for others, or not? Should we post this type of aggressive nonsense for the sake of transparency and documentation, and reveal the statements a Jewish museum has to deal with? Should we perhaps even reply to them and invalidate the commentator’s ‘arguments,’ if he or she has any? Or would we be offering anti-Semites an unwarranted platform? So far, we have opted against publishing the type of comment which reproduces age-old theories of world conspiracy. Such delusions are far too widely proliferated already, and we neither want to spread them further nor compel our readers to take them seriously on the Jewish Museum’s blog.

Blog editor at work

Much more often, the blog’s inbox contains a chorus of praise: “Thanks for the wise analysis,” one reader tells us, or, an even more enthusiastic writer: “Super-Duper website! I am loving it!! Will come back again.”

Some are positively ecstatic: → continue reading