A Jewish Museum Shifts Identity

Keegan Houser

BERKELEY, Calif. — The story of how the Judah L. Magnes Museum — whose collection of Judaica is the third largest in the country — became the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, might not seem terribly ripe with complication or implication. In recent years small private museums facing financial strain have often sought refuge by negotiating new lives within universities. Perhaps on Sunday, when the Magnes opened its doors to the public in a building it had long owned near the campus here, it was simply inaugurating another phase of its 50-year life.

But along the way the Magnes has had more than its share of high drama, including a much anticipated union with another local Jewish museum in 2002, closely followed by a quickie divorce on grounds of irreconcilable differences. Then, the Magnes had to watch as its onetime partner achieved local glory as the Contemporary Jewish Museum, opening in downtown San Francisco in 2008 in a new building designed by Daniel Libeskind. Meanwhile the Magnes struggled to map out a future for its rambling and exotic collection of some 15,000 objects and manuscripts, which since 1966 had been housed in a rambling and exotic mansion on a residential street. It attracted no more than 10,000 visitors annually and cost $2 million a year to maintain.

The story also has larger resonance. The fate of the Magnes has much to do with the evolution of the American identity museum, with its chronicles of ethnic liberation amid hardship. And it is also intimately connected to the political and cultural temperament of the Bay Area.

But to understand those issues it is best, first, to consider the collection itself. The Magnes was created in 1962 by Seymour Fromer, a Jewish educator, and Rebecca Camhi Fromer, his wife. Its artifacts were deliberately wide-ranging, including not just Jewish ritual objects but manuscripts, music and ephemera. As the collections grew they shed light on Jewish life in the pioneering era of the American West, on Jewish observance in communities in India or Tunisia, and on artworks that testified in some way to Jewish experience in the 20th century. Over the decades scholarly catalogs were published and exhibitions were mounted in the museum’s Berkeley mansion, examining, say, the culture of Kurdish Jews or the nature of Jewish cemeteries during the Gold Rush.

I visited the Magnes only once in its old home, and its slightly ramshackle style, along with its displays mixing the eccentric traditional and the provocatively experimental, gave it an almost esoteric charm. Only a small fraction of the collection was on site, and only a small part of that was ever on display. But the place, even in its late days, was clearly the work of particular personalities with their own idiosyncrasies and preoccupations. It was not an “objective” museum; it was personal, invitational, as if saying, “Come and look at what we have gathered and learned.”

Now all that has been — as was once said — “modernized.” The Magnes Collection, donated to the university along with a lease on its new building, is still under the directorship of the Russian-born art historian Alla Efimova, who is partly revisiting her past: before joining the Magnes in 2003 she had taught in Berkeley’s art history department and had worked in the school’s art museum. The Magnes’s Italian-born curator, Francesco Spagnolo, who holds a doctorate from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and has taught both philosophy and music, remains in place as well. Eighty percent of the collection is now on site; a digital catalog of its riches is developing, along with an online photographic record.

But the new Magnes Collection bears little resemblance to the old Magnes Museum. The new building, near the campus, once a printing plant, filters away most glints of personality. The San Francisco architect Peter Pfau has made it crisp, spare, rectilinear and clean. Its design also ensures that archival storage drawers and cabinets can be seen on either side of a central 1,500-square-foot exhibition gallery.

Function has changed along with design. Its largest space is a gathering place for events, concerts and lectures: an auditorium. Another room is designed for researchers to examine material from the archives. The Magnes, we sense, is primarily a place for study, lectures and social gatherings, the main modes of university life.

The museum aspect — the public display of artifacts and interpretations — is more muted. Partly this is because the largest gallery space is temporarily given over to a video art installation, “Dissolving Localities,” created by Emmanuel Witzthum and Arik Futterman; it overlays sounds and images from Jerusalem on one large screen and of Berkeley on the other. It wasn’t complete when I visited, but it was difficult to imagine it as much more than a conceptual commentary on the collection.

The central gallery is where we are meant to focus, where the first temporary exhibition is titled “The Magnes Effect: Five Decades of Collecting.” It is a sampling of the museum’s holdings. There is a marriage contract from 1915 from the Kochi Jewish community of India and a Jewish wedding dress from 19th-century Rhodes, Greece. A painting shows the early-20th-century incarnation of San Francisco’s Temple Emanu-El. A poster advertises the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which the Magnes helped establish. And a sword and scabbard are shown from 19th-century Palestine: they were presented by the Ottoman government to the Jerusalem-born businessman Yosef Navon to honor his role in the creation of the Jaffa-Jerusalem railway in 1892.

Each object, of course, could easily become a centerpiece of another exhibition, but their presentation here seemed less important than the suggestion that these were markers for a profusion of other objects, which could be seen on either side, encased in the archival cabinetry. The point of the display is how much more there is to display. But this means that being a museum has become secondary to the other roles the Magnes is taking on.

This may simply be the price a private institution must pay to ensure that its collection is cared for, that it will serve scholars and that it will, over time, become a center for social and intellectual life. (Its current annual budget is $820,000.) But the compromises are significant; it is also unfortunate that one of the cores of the Magnes, the collections relating to Western Jewish life, are being folded into the Bancroft Library. They will fill out the university’s collection about the history of the American West instead of serving the Magnes’s survey of Jewish life and history.

Source: www.nytimes.com