The Jewish Museum of Switzerland, in Basel, reopens November 30 with a new and expanded permanent exhibition in new premises — a former wooden tobacco warehouse that has been completely restructured as a state of the art museum.
It will have a revamped, two-story core exhibition called Cult, Culture, Art: Jewish Experiences that will features art, ritual objects, and archival material.
Nearly 80 archive drawers contain documents from the museum’s collection and offer deeper exploration of the exhibition themes. A recurring, participatory element is Collecting in Real Time, where visitors contribute personal photos on specific topics. A children’s path provides interactive content tailored to young visitors aged four to twelve.
Its facade is decorated with a monumental reproduction of an abstract work from the Polish Villages series by the American artist Frank Stella. It was inspired by pre-war photographs of a once-majestic wooden synagogue in the small town of Jeziory, today in Belarus. The series features monumental sculptures, collages, and maquettes inspired by Eastern European towns with wooden synagogues destroyed by the Nazis.
The museum’s inaugural special exhibition will be focused on Stella’s Polish Village series, called “Frank Stella and the Destroyed Wooden Synagogues of Eastern Europe.” It includes original works by Stella as well as 24 synagogue models created by Holocaust survivor Moshe Verbin. (The POLIN museum in Warsaw ran an exhibition of the works in 2016.)
Watch a video of the inauguration of the Stella work on the facade of the Swiss museum — in German with subtitles in English.
The new museum location, at Vesalgasse 5, 4051 Basel, has a historical significance. The grounds next to it are the site of the cemetery of Basel’s medieval Jewish community.
“Monumental tombstones from the 13th and 14th centuries survived the pogroms of 1349 and will be displayed at the museum entrance,” the Museum states. “The museum will make the site’s history visible through an open-air installation developed in collaboration with the Historical Museum of Basel and the Cantonal Office for Archaeological Research.”
The Jewish Museum of Switzerland was founded in 1966 as the first Jewish museum in German-speaking Europe after World War II. Funding for the move to new premises came from canton Basel-Stadt to public institutions, private foundations, among them the Christoph Merian Stiftung, and individual donors.
Watch a video of the reconstruction of the warehouse into the museum.
Read information about the new museum premises and exhibition