JMB: highest visitor numbers for 13 years

“Key contributors to this success were the JMB Children’s World ANOHA and the exhibition Paris Magnétique, 1905–1940, which ran from 25 January to 1 May 2023,” reports Hetty Berg, Director of the JMB. “On just ninety-seven days, around 50,000 visitors came to see works by Jewish artists of the ‘School of Paris’ and draw inspiration from the way that migrant, often margina­lized, positions within the Parisian avant-garde shaped our present-day ideas of Western modernist art. In 2023, 16 percent of the JMB’s visitors came to see ANOHA, the museums Children’s World, which had a total of 116,279 visitors.”

Alongside the core exhibition, the JMB is currently presenting the exhi­bition Another Country: Jewish in the GDR, which will open its doors for the last time on Sunday, 14 January. Every­one is invited to the closing event at 2 p.m. that day. On 9 February, a new exhibition opens, “My Verses Are like Dyna­mite”: Curt Bloch’s Het Onderwater Cabaret. For the very first time, this presents to the public the works and life of Curt Bloch, a German Jew who went underground in the Netherl­ands during the Second World War. While in hiding from the Nazis and their collabo­rators, Bloch created a unique testimony to artistic resistance.

On May 17, the exhibition Sex: Jewish Positions opens. From the central importance of marriage and procreation, via desire, taboos, and the questioning of social norms, to the eroticism of spirituality, the exhi­bition presents the whole spectrum of Jewish attitudes and shows that traditional debates are highly relevant to present-day Jewish positions on sexuality.