“L’chaim! To life!”

We’d like to let you know about a very special documentary screening at Kino Babylon Mitte, Berlin, on 25 August: L’chaim! To life!

The film portraits Chaim Lubelski, an orthodox Jew and successful businessman in New York who jet-sets to St. Tropez. When his mother, a Holocaust survivor, is in need of care, he returns to Antwerp to look after her.

Trailer

In his feature-film debut, producer and director Elkan Spiller presents his cousin, Chaim, as a rebellious, charming maverick – a man who tries to relieve his parents’ pain with courage, humor and love.  continue reading


The Art Vending Machine Gets an Extended Run with “Glass Interiors” by Daniel Wiesenfeld

A man stands next to an electric kiln

Daniel Wiesenfeld at work. The freshly baked glass plates cool off in the oven, 2015
© Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Anna Golus

The last few weeks, while people everywhere were sizzling in the summer sun, Daniel Wiesenfeld was ‘baking’ a hundred new works of art for our art vending machine. What good luck, meanwhile, that the machine is nearly sold out!

Daniel is presenting the Jewish Museum Berlin with what is already the third series of works for the vending machine, all three of which are incomparable. In April we received a hundred oil paintings with self-portraits of the artist bearing a variety of poignant grimaces, along with a hundred charcoal drawings featuring a number of different motifs. For this new series, Daniel decided on a technique that’s new not only for him but for the vending machine as well: stained glass.

I visited Daniel a few days ago in Berlin’s Tempelhof neighborhood.  continue reading


“I was never disengaged”

A Conversation with Rachel Heuberger on the Biblical Story of the Binding of Isaac and the Exhibition “Obedience”

An old man and a young man, a person dressed in white and a man dressed in dark colours with long red hair and a donkey, all moving on tarmac

Still from a film in the installation “Obedience”
© S. Boddeke & P. Greenaway, photo: Digidaan

The exhibition “Obedience. An Installation in 15 Rooms by Saskia Boddeke & Peter Greenaway” has been open for some time now at the Jewish Museum Berlin. As with every exhibition, this one meets the approval of our visitors to various degrees. Unlike other exhibitions however, the feedback – which often reaches us later – is different than what we might have anticipated. Indeed, this was the case with Dr. Rachel Heuberger, the curator of the Hebraica and Judaica collections at the University Library of Frankfurt. We spoke right after her visit about her thoughts and impressions.

Mirjam Wenzel: You just saw the exhibition “Obedience” by Saskia Boddeke and Peter Greenaway. How would you describe it?  continue reading