(JHE) — The Manchester Jewish Museum reopened July 2 after being closed for two years for a large-scale expansion and redevelopment that saw the construction of a modern new wing and full restoration of the Grade II listed Victorian synagogue where it has been housed.
The only Jewish Museum in the UK outside of London, the Manchester museum opened in the synagogue in 1984.
As we have written in earlier articles, the £6 million revamp doubled the museum’s size with a modern new wing with a distinctive Corten Steel facade designed by Citizens Design Bureau. It added new galleries and a new core exhibit as well as a kosher-style vegetarian café, shop, and collection storage. There are also a new learning studio and learning kitchen, where groups and visitors can learn about Jewish heritage though kashrut and culinary traditions. The project received a £2.89 million National Lottery Heritage grant.
Museum curator Alex Cropper said the new core exhibition uses three themes to present parts of the museum’s collection of more than 31,000 items: Journeys, Communities and Identities.
“All the stories told on gallery are Jewish,” she said in an interview on the museum web site, “but by framing them within these universal themes they hopefully feel relevant to all of our audiences.”
See a video of some of the new features:
Artefacts, photos, documents, and other objects are combined with magnetic synagogue maps, moveable digital labels, and a wall of quotes from the collection. Personal stories and oral histories are a key focus, including the stories of immigrants and refugees who ended jp in Manchester.
The exhibit includes, for example, a dress and other items from Helen Taichner, a Holocaust survivor who spend six months of WW2 hiding in a coal cellar.
“That story is incredible,” Cropper said.
Similarly our famous Harris House Diary (a diary kept by fifteen young refugee girls who stayed at a guest house in Southport in 1940) is such a special item from the collection and is now showcased properly on gallery. But I also love the little items like membership cards to the various sports and social clubs which really evoke a different time.
Cropper added:
Members of the community have also been directly involved in creating new content for the museum such as in our Synagogue Voices project where we have asked people who have memories of our building as a synagogue to share their stories with us. This content will form the interpretation inside our newly restored synagogue.
The museum’s Spanish and Portuguese synagogue was built in 1874 and closed for worship in 1983. A key factor in the Museum redevelopment has been a full restoration of the synagogue, with a focus on the interior decorations and painting, and also the stained glass windows.
Matt Schwab, from the design company All Things Studio, which worked on the new gallery space, said that otherwise, interventions were “very minimal and light-touch.”
We wanted visitors’ primary experience of the synagogue to be of the beauty and atmosphere of the space with any interpretation subtly providing context and understanding. We have designed a series of portable speakers that play the voices of Jewish people from the museum’s oral history collection, describing what the synagogue means to them and how they remember important occasions. This approach allows visitors to gain an understanding of what the parts of the synagogue are and how they’re used without the need for more text-based interpretation panels.
Among the items on display in the new core exhibition is a time capsule — a large, sealed glass jar tightly stuffed with documents, newspapers, and even some coins — that was hidden in the wall of the synagogue near the ark, placed there when the building was constructed and found by workers carrying out the restoration.
Watch an ITV report on the museum — with video
See an article about the revamped museum on About Manchester
1 comment on “UK: Manchester Jewish Museum reopens after two years of closure and £6 million revamp & expansion”
I lived in Manchester from 1969-1970. I am a retired Registered Nurse. During the mentioned years, I was a staff nurse working at the old Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital.
I am a Holocaust survivor from France. My family immigrated to the USA in 1947.
I presently reside in Houston, Texas and I volunteer at Holocaust Museum Houston.