The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow: Judaism for the masses
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Abstract
In 2012, a new Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center opened in Moscow – an event unthinkable during the Soviet regime. Financed at the level of $50 million, created by an international crew of academics and museum designers, and located in a landmark building, the museum immediately rose to a position of cultural prominence in the Russian museum scene. Using interactive technology and multimedia, the museum's core exhibition presents several centuries of complex local Jewish history, including the Second World War period. Naturally, the Holocaust is an important part of the story. Olga Gershenson's essay analyzes the museum's relationship to Holocaust history and memory in the post-Soviet context. She describes the museum's struggle to reconcile a Soviet understanding of the “Great Patriotic War” with a dominant Western narrative of the Holocaust, while also bringing the Holocaust in the Soviet Union to a broader audience via the museum. Through recorded testimonies, period documents, and film, the museum's display narrates the events of the Holocaust on Soviet soil. This is a significant revision of the Soviet-era discourse, which universalized and externalized the Holocaust. But this important revision is limited by the museum's choice to avoid the subject of local collaborators and bystanders. The museum shies away from the most pernicious aspect of the Holocaust history on Soviet soil, missing an opportunity to take historic responsibility and confront the difficult past.
Topics
Main Topic: Culture and Heritage Jewish Museums Post-1989 Jewish Revival Memory Holocaust Commemoration Holocaust Education
Genre
Geographic Coverage
Original Language
Volume/Issue
45(2-3)
Page Number / Article Number
158-173
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DOI
Link
Link to article including link to pdf, The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow: Judaism for the masses
Bibliographic Information
The Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow: Judaism for the masses. 2015: 158-173. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/10.1080/13501674.2015.1062668
