The Jewish Children`s Museum is the brainchild of Chabad`s youth movement, “Tzivos HaShem,” which is otherwise known for its traveling matzah, Torah and shofar factories. This museum combines the perspectives of the amusement park, the art museum and the museum of ethnography. While the Disney model of mass entertainment may capture the hearts of the young and young at heart, the Jewish Children`s Museum still adheres to the traditional Jewish museum principles: ritual, life cycle and calendar year. Groups of public school children are escorted through the exhibits and offered an opportunity to get a sense of their Jewish neighbors` history and culture. Because the guides, librarians and gift shop and cafeteria workers are all Chabadniks, viewers also enjoy the added benefit of a live ethnographic display. The trip to the museum provides the bonus of a tour of Crown Heights, a crash-course in Lubavitch dress, food and customs.
A ‘Dreidel’ Grows in Brooklyn: The Jewish Childrens Museum
At some point, many Jewish parents have been confronted with a child begging to sit on Santa`s lap — asking for secret presents — or longing to search for eggs with the Easter bunny. The Jewish Children`s Museum has dealt a blow to Jewish Christmas-tree envy by rescuing symbols, icons and toys from a cerebral, textual Judaism. While artists, critics and academics debate the role of Jewish art and Jewish museums, Chabad-Lubavitch built a $31 million children`s wonderland in the heart of Crown Heights.
The Jewish Children`s Museum is the brainchild of Chabad`s youth movement, “Tzivos HaShem,” which is otherwise known for its traveling matzah, Torah and shofar factories. This museum combines the perspectives of the amusement park, the art museum and the museum of ethnography. While the Disney model of mass entertainment may capture the hearts of the young and young at heart, the Jewish Children`s Museum still adheres to the traditional Jewish museum principles: ritual, life cycle and calendar year. Groups of public school children are escorted through the exhibits and offered an opportunity to get a sense of their Jewish neighbors` history and culture. Because the guides, librarians and gift shop and cafeteria workers are all Chabadniks, viewers also enjoy the added benefit of a live ethnographic display. The trip to the museum provides the bonus of a tour of Crown Heights, a crash-course in Lubavitch dress, food and customs.
The heart of the museum resides on the third and fourth floors, which exhibit Biblical history and its heroes, religious holidays and customs, the Holocaust and contemporary Jewish life. On these floors, scale is the predominant language of the museum. The museum boasts the largest havdalah candle in the world and a miniature interactive supermarket to test the kosher prowess of pint-sized cashiers. A giant grandfatherly talking tree explains how trees and humans are spiritual twins. Children walk on a super-sized Shabbos table, set with a pristine white tablecloth, colossal candlesticks, a looming Kiddush cup and chicken soup with matzah balls the size of soccer balls. Dozens of life-size dioramas, including Norman Rockwell`s The Gossips (illustrating lashon hara or evil speech), are accessorized with multi-media, high-tech special effects.
The art in the museum was chosen for its dramatic impact, rather than its aesthetic import; images simply illustrate. Art at the JCM is a utilitarian instrument for democratic education, with the curators replacing overused Chagall icons of tired Shtetls with Miriam`s tambourines and olive presses. Although there is a conscious attempt to downplay the role of Chabad in the museum`s narrative, the museum director Gershon Eichorn has chosen Chabad-affiliated works of art. Original paintings by Michel Schwartz and Michoel Muchnik offer an authentic art museum experience, while reproductions of Zalman Kleinman and Yossi Rosenstein are blown up to quadruple their size without notation to the artist, title or date. Even more interesting than Chabad-affiliated art is the museum`s integration of Modern art and popular culture. The grand lobby hosts a Mondrian-style grid for the donor`s plaque; Matisse`s Dance serves as the inspiration for part of the miniature golf installation; and the building itself is a monument to Modern architecture. These details provide an inviting setting for introducing a minority culture to a majority culture versed in Modernist aesthetics.
Although teachers and parents tend to emphasize the text, the tour and the lessons offered by the installations, the museum has oriented itself towards reclaiming the magic of Jewish history and ritual. Despite the detail-oriented exhibits designed by the firms of Douglas/Gallagher and Nash Brookes and curated with the help of Paul Rosenthal, visitors experience the Jewish Children`s Museum in a state of giddy distraction. One walks through the exhibits mouth agape, with a childlike desire to touch, to smell and to bless.
The special effects throughout the exhibitions are so entrancing that even the mature visitor forgets to focus on “Jewish Culture,” caught up in the excitement the museum is designed to promote. While Jewish artists and academics try to decide how to articulate and represent the unimaginable — such as the Divine and the Holocaust — the JCM has ignored the debate altogether and reconstructed humble Har Sinai with its explosion of flowers, thunder and lightning and the majestic acquisition of the Ten Commandments. There is still awe before a theatrical vision of the Revelation and the Six Days of Creation, even when the man behind the curtain reveals himself.
Whether or not the scholarship that motivated the creation of the museum is easily apparent is beside the point. The fact that it is open to the public — traditional and unaffiliated, Jewish and non-Jewish alike — inserts Judaism into the public space. Chabad`s giant menorahs and dreidels succeed in breaking the “taboo” of confronting traditional Jewish identity in a public forum. When children are invited to crawl through a monumental challah that smells like the real thing, the museum avoids being labeled “too Jewish” by being so over the top that the foreign and the ethnic are actually muted in the tradition of a chopped liver mold of Lenny Bruce.
While traditional Jewish museums tell the Jewish story via uninspired collections of coins, stamps and Kiddush cups, the JCM has reclaimed the iconic, the sensual and the magical. The 24-foot, $100,000 sculptural mural “The Treasured Land” by Michoel Muchnik integrates hundreds of mitzvos and customs in the form of buried treasures. Miniature golfing through the Stages of Man and climbing through the material culture of Shabbos and yom tov makes Jewish values accessible at the same time that it liberates and celebrates the spectacle of Jewish difference.
The Holocaust section is not scheduled to open until Hanukkah, but based on the rest of the museum, the exhibit will undoubtedly reconstruct the traditional presentation without feeling compelled to tell the entire narrative. The installations will find heroism and nobility where others have found only discontinuity and silence. While scholars will continue to argue about the ethical responsibility and proper means of representing the Shoah, Chabad will educate hundreds of thousands of children about the preservation of Jewish culture in the most dire of circumstances.
The Jewish Children`s Museum
792 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn
(718) 467-0600
