Germany’s Die Welt newspaper has reported that the city of Cologne and the Rhineland Regional Council (LVR) signed a framework agreement last week for the construction of a long-planned, long-contested Jewish museum.
The article notes that there has long been a “tug of war” over the €52 million project.
Instead of an originally independent construction in the immediate vicinity of Cologne’s historic city hall, the facility will now be integrated in the same place in the “Archaeological Zone.” The 10,000 square meter site is dug since 2007. Once opened up to visitors, it would create one of the largest underground museums in Europe. […] Under the Framework Agreement, the City of Cologne bears the investment costs for the structural realization of “Archaeological Zone” and the Jewish Museum and the cost of the initial setup. The LVR is responsible for the development of the museum concept and contributes to the completion of the museum’s operating costs. In a next step, the internal political and administrative bodies will constitute, in which the city and the LVR will send their representatives to accompany the project.
The Jewish Museum/Archaeological Zone has been a bone of contention in the cash-strapped city, for political as well as financial reasons. Some critics, for example, wanted to scrap the plans for the Jewish Museum and create instead a “house of Cologne’s history.”
In April, Cologne’s mayor removed the longtime director of the project, Sven Schuette, from his post after Schuette was quoted in Ha’aretz as suggesting that anti-Semitism could be behind some of the criticism.
Schuette was to have spoken at the Krakow conference on managing Jewish immovable heritage, but was prevented from coming because of his removal from the project. Max Polonovski from the French Culture Ministry presented Schuette’s detailed power point, however — which can be see in its entirety online.
In his blog on Jewish art and monuments, Samuel D. Gruber has written extensively about some of the important finds during the Cologne excavations, as well as the controversy.
The project’s extensive web site is a rich resource on the history of the site, the progress of the excavations and plans for the museum.