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A conversation with art historian, rabbi, and literature collector Edward van Voolen, drs.

For three and a half years now, the art historian and rabbi Edward van Voolen has supported the DFG project. With his help, our library has developed into a research library for Jewish art, through generous gifts from his private collection. It now includes over 500 publications in the fields of Jewish art and material culture.

Edward van Voolen; photo: private

For 35 years, Mr. van Voolen was a curator at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. He is now a rabbi in Germany. Since 2003, he has taught at the Abraham Geiger College at the University of Potsdam, publishing regularly on topics related to Jewish religion, art, and history.

Lea Weik asked him a few questions about his passion for collecting, and about his considerable donation.

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There are films slumbering in an archive somewhere, waiting to be discovered. And there are films that have sunk into oblivion but then suddenly pop up again, in the form of a soundtrack.

The schellac records, as found © Jewish Museum Berlin, Photo: Regina Wellen

Recently, when stock was being moved to another depot, our colleague Regina Wellen looked over the collection of 78rpm schellac records with a view to devising a new way of storing them. She thereby came across eleven not yet inventoried records, much larger than the usual sort and with a label suggestive of some other purpose than easy listening on the home gramophone. Luckily for us, Regina was quickly able to establish that these were examples of the sound-on-disc recordings played in cinemas as an accompaniment to screenings of otherwise silent films—synchronously, thanks to the built-in start signal. One of the twenty numbered boxes on each label used to be checked after each screening, so as to ensure that a worn-out record would be replaced in good time. After Regina had dry-cleaned the records and prepared → continue reading

Gray literature held by the library, Gross Family Collection © Jewish Museum Berlin, Photo: Lea Weik

The library of the Jewish Museum Berlin is growing day by day. Since early 2014, this has been particularly noticeable in the Jewish visual and applied arts section, which currently stocks about 10,000 media objects (books, journals, non-book media, etc.). As part of the framework of a project funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation), which I have been working on for the past year, our team has had the opportunity to make essential acquisitions and to close existing gaps in this area. Further expansion is planned—and will take us another big step towards our goal of establishing a research library for Jewish art and cultural history.

Before the first Jewish visual and applied arts publications arrived at the library, there were many tasks to be performed: first and foremost, to settle the question, → continue reading