Angling To Fit In

As the downtown Jewish scene expands, the Museum of Jewish Heritage — with award-winning exhibits but a hard-to-reach location — struggles for a foothold.

photographs by michael datikash

by Ted Merwin
Special To The Jewish Week

‘At last, at long, long last, Battery Park City has acquired a soul,” wrote Herbert Muschamp of The New York Times when the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, opened its doors in Battery Park City in September of 1997. The museum’s intention, however, extended far beyond rescuing its immediate neighborhood from what Muschamp called a “well-intentioned but bleakly suburban, golf course conception of modern urban life.” Its purpose was, in a sense, to redeem modern Jewish history itself, by placing the Holocaust in a wider context of Jewish experience before, during and after the Second World War.
The museum has gone on to mount award-winning exhibitions and blockbuster cultural programs. It has a kosher café run by celebrity chef

Jeff Nathan, a stunning riverfront promenade and a flourishing Memorial Garden, including British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy’s moving Garden of Stones. It sponsors a plethora of concerts, lectures, film screenings, panel discussions, and other cultural events — many of which feature internationally acclaimed performers and artists like pianist Vladimir Feltsman and poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. But it still remains to some extent an undiscovered gem in the city’s cultural crown.
Is geography destiny? Has the museum’s location, which commands panoramic views of New York harbor but has no adjacent subway stations, helped or hindered
its quest to be a major player both in the overall New York cultural landscape and in the expanding Jewish downtown scene?
The impetus to create a Holocaust museum in New York, the city where the largest number of the world’s Holocaust survivors reside (outside Israel), arose in 1981 with the formation of a task force by Mayor Ed Koch. It took 15 years of wrangling between the city and state, which owned Battery Park City, for the museum to be built. By then, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., had opened with great fanfare. From the outset, New York’s Holocaust museum has found itself in the shadow of the national museum, which is fortunate both to occupy a prime location on the Mall, and to benefit from millions of dollars in funding from the federal government.
David G. Marwell, the Museum of Jewish Heritage’s director, formerly investigated Nazi war crimes for the Justice Department. He told The Jewish Week that the museum fills a void by telling a story that is “more about life than death.” Other Holocaust museums, he charged, tend to “disembody Jewish history by neither giving any sense of the magnitude of what was destroyed nor displaying the story of its rebirth.”
The museum itself, Marwell pointed out, has participated in a major way in the rebirth of Lower Manhattan. While the building was forced to close for a few weeks after 9/11, it broke ground on a new wing shortly thereafter, jump-starting the first new wave of construction in the area. Marwell watched the trucks taking debris from the World Trade Center site pass the trucks bringing steel to the museum.
The new wing was named for Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who served as secretary of the treasury under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and who convinced Roosevelt of the urgent need for America to help rescue Jews from the Nazis. His grandson, Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, chairs the museum’s board. Morgenthau is hardly the only heavy-hitter trustee; the board also includes George Klein, a major real estate developer, and Judah Gribetz, a lawyer charged with distributing more than $1 billion in Holocaust reparations from Swiss banks.
Their financial investments in the museum have paid rich dividends. Last year’s major exhibit at the museum, “Ours to Fight For: American Jews in the Second World War,” won a grand prize from the American Association of Museums. The museum’s current exhibit, “Daring to Resist: Jewish Defiance in the Holocaust,” which cost $3 million to mount, has been hailed by many critics. Nor does the museum only present grim subjects: it has a current exhibit on Jewish vacationing that highlights such iconic Jewish places as the Catskills, Miami Beach and Atlantic City.
But despite its physical and financial assets, and the sterling quality of its exhibits, the museum’s attendance is much lower than the building can accommodate. While it had its highest number of visitors ever in the 10 days preceding 9/11, it has struggled since then to increase its attendance. The museum currently attracts about 150,000 visitors per year, approximately one-third of whom are schoolchildren. Marwell said he would like to see the overall number rise by at least 100,000.
Michael Dorf, who produces the cutting-edge cultural Downtown Seder every Passover at the museum, said that while the museum’s location and physical attributes are tremendous assets, “for those of us in Tribeca to cross the West Side Highway feels like a shlep. It’s a psychological hurdle that keeps people from going there.”
While it might be only a 15-minute walk, Dorf said, “it’s a long 15 minutes,” especially in winter when icy winds blow in from the river. He also pointed out that while the museum is staunch in its mission to commemorate the Holocaust, he considers it an odd venue for some contemporary art performances, which tend to promote a radical, boundary-crossing vision of Jewish culture.
But Joey Low, founder of Israel at Heart, an organization that brings Israelis to speak and perform in the United States, begs to differ. Low has arranged concerts at the museum by iconoclastic Israeli singers Ivri Lider and Idan Raichel. Lider, who is openly gay, and Raichel, who performs “world music” with African and South American singers, have helped the museum broaden its outreach to the younger generation.
Low said that Raichel’s concerts for the Daniel Pearl Music Days in October were especially successful, with many young audience members reporting that they were attending an event at the museum for the first time. He recalled that Lider especially enjoyed performing on the museum’s handcrafted Fazioli piano, the only one in a New York concert hall.
According to Marwell, the museum is indeed trying to appeal to what he calls the “third generation,” the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. He pointed out that the museum features eclectic programs, including a panel discussion on the origins of punk rock, a festival of film shorts and sold-out concerts by “kosher gospel” singer Joshua Nelson, who returns
on Christmas Day for the third year in a row. The museum also sponsors family programs, including holiday celebrations that feature storytelling and puppet shows.
Marwell acknowledged, however, that the museum faces what he calls “significant hindrances” in boosting its attendance, caused largely by the perception that the museum is off the beaten track. In reality, Marwell said, there are three subway stations within a few blocks walk of the museum; he noted that the museum is particularly convenient for Brooklynites. There is also a free shuttle, operated by the Downtown Alliance, which stops in front of the museum and goes to the South Ferry station. He conceded, however, that ongoing construction in the neighborhood, especially on Fulton Street and in the vicinity of South Ferry, has made it cumbersome for some potential visitors to reach the building.
Despite the difficulty in reaching it, the location is in some ways ideal, Marwell added, for a museum that takes the importance of human freedom as an overriding theme. “Where else do you have unobstructed views of the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island?” he asked. He said that a new system of timed tickets for the boats to these two attractions will enable ticket buyers to spend the intervening time at the museum. And he expressed a hope that the thousands of daily visitors to Ground Zero will begin to take advantage of other cultural opportunities in the neighborhood, including those provided by the local museums.
Elise Bernhardt, director of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, recalled that when she first took over the downtown performing arts space called The Kitchen in the late 1990s, there were only a few dozen art galleries in the neighborhood. A decade later, she said, there were hundreds.
The situation of Battery Park City is “a bit like Brooklyn,” she said. “Not long ago, no one wanted to trek out to BAM. Now you can’t get a ticket.” But even though the museum may be “a little ahead of its time, geographically,” she predicted that it will benefit from the blossoming cultural life in the area and the ongoing conversion of commercial properties to luxury apartment buildings, which will bring many more people into the neighborhood.
Meanwhile, the museum continues its mission of commemorating the Holocaust and strengthening the power of Jewish memory. Morgenthau told The Jewish Week that raising the money for the museum was not easy. “The white-shoe Jews asked me why I wanted to dredge all this stuff up,” he recalled. “They asked me why I don’t just let bygones be bygones.” He paused. “I told them ‘I wish I could. I wish I could.’”

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization