(JHE) — The Jewish Museum of Belgium is gearing up for a large-scale, multi-million euro renovation and redevelopment that will restructure, expand and modernize its premises and create a new permanent exhibition. Work will begin in 2023, with a planned reopening in 2025.
“Currently, our permanent exhibition is composed of a section dedicated to Jewish traditions, one to Jewish artists from the 20th century, and one on Moroccan Jews,” Barbara Cuglietta, who took up the post of museum director in June, told JHE. “In the new museum, we are going to dedicate a part of our exhibition to those Belgian Jews who contributed to the creation of Belgium, and another aspect we will need to deal with in the new permanent exhibition is the Holocaust, and the Jewish and Belgian resistance.”
The museum was inaugurated in 1990, and since 2002 it has been hosted in a fin-de-siècle building on downtown Rue de Minimes.
On May 24, 2014, four people: two tourists and two members of the Museum staff, were killed in a terrorist attack at the Museum. At the entrance, there is a plaque remembering the attack and the victims’ names.
Cuglietta said, however, that the renovation will aim to make the museum welcoming to the public. It will also continue to organize a range of educational activities and other programs.
“We want to open the Jewish Museum to the city. We want the public to have a look at the museum, which should not be seen as a fortress,” she said.
A museum cannot only be a display of history and objects but should also be a place of multicultural discussion and dialogue, where everybody is welcome. My challenge is to keep what we built so far in terms of openness, that voice we have in the human rights field, in the fight against antisemitism, and in the development of critical minds, fighting also polarization.
Earlier this year, the Museum received the Democracy and Human Rights Prize, granted by the Parliament of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, for its work in the field of Holocaust memory and its promotion of the values of openness and intercultural dialogue.
The renovation plans were presented in November by a consortium of three architectural and design firms that won a public call launched by the Museum: Tab Architectural Firm, the Spanish firm Barozzi Veiga (specialized in museum architecture), and the Belgian restorer Barbara Van der Wee.
The existing façade will be maintained, but a modern loggia will be constructed on top of the building, from which visitors will have a 360o view of the city.
“We will suggest our visitors to start their visit from the loggia, admiring a beautiful view, from which you can also see the old Jewish quarter,” Cuglietta said.
Exhibition spaces will be modernized and expanded, and site security and fire prevention will be improved.
The ground floor will host a large foyer with a ticket office, a bookshop and a coffeeshop, and it will be easily seen from the street through three large windows.
The new permanent exhibition will be displayed on the 1st to the 4th floor. A multipurpose underground hall will be developed beneath the ground floor, which will host different events, from educational to social gatherings. Temporary exhibitions will continue to be hosted in a building at the other end of the internal patio, which is not included in the large-scale renovation project.
The total cost of the renovation work amounts to around €6 million, Culgietta said, funded by the Jewish Museum, the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, and Beliris, a federal foundation dedicated to heritage works in Brussels. The funds to cover the development of the new permanent exhibition — an estimated €1 million — have yet to be raised, she said.
Cuglietta said that during the two years of closure the museum will remain active – online and in cooperation with other institutions. “We are going to relocate somewhere, to find partners with whom we can organize exhibitions together, and we will certainly go online with the rich archival and collections material we have,” she said.
The museum will be the latest European Jewish museum to undergo a major revamp of its core exhibition and/or physical space.
Others have included the Frankfurt Jewish Museum, which reopened in October with expanded premises and a new exhibition after five years of work, and the Berlin Jewish Museum, which reopened after more than two and a half years with a totally revamped core exhibition. The Jewish Museum in Manchester, England, closed last year for extensive expansion and redevelopment, is expected to reopen in Spring 2021. Likewise, the Venice Jewish Museum is about to undergo a full-scale expansion, revamp, and redevelopment.
Read details about the project on the Museum web site HERE and HERE