Anna Blayer, the retired director of Rome’s Jewish Museum, has died, aged 78.
Blayer, a longtime Jewish activist, was the director of the Jewish Museum from the mid-1980s until 2005, when Daniela Di Castro (who, sadly, passed away prematurely in 2010) took over, inaugurating a totally revamped, enlarged and modernized facility and exhibition in new space in the basement of the synagogue complex.
Born Anna Ascarelli in Rome, on Oct. 5, 1934, Blayer survived the Holocaust as a child, hidden in a Roman convent.
Under her directorship, the museum was developed into a recognized institution, and school programs became a focus. It was primarily a collection of Judaica (much of it still in use and moved in and out of the adjacent synagogue), with little textural or historic information or material, displayed in a couple of rooms next to the sanctuary.
In the late 1990s, she told JHE coordinator Ruth Ellen Gruber that she viewed the Museum as the “calling card” of the Jewish community. She felt that only living Jews could really tell the Jewish story correctly, from within a living Jewish context.
“When we show visitors Hanukah menorahs and explain Hanukah, for example, we explain the symbolism in all details, elaborating similarities and differences with Christianity,” Blayer said. “But you can only do this through the voice of a person who can make these comparisons. I don’t think you can do it with information panels — for one thing, not everybody reads the panels. A museum is multi-form,” she added. “It is one thing to describe something to someone, another thing to read a panel. With panels, you just get sterile information — I think you need a living person to explain things properly.
Watch a video interview (in Italian) with Anna Blayer, from 2011 (Part 1)
Part 2 of video interview (in Italian) with Anna Blayer, mainly reflecting on her time at the Museum