The Jewish Museum of Switzerland is offering a host of cultural activities and guided tours for the start of the 2024-5 academic year, and will shortly be moving into a new building. Here’s our interview with Barbara Haene, scientific assistant and events manager at the museum.
Jguideeurope: What event will open the European Days of Jewish Culture?
Barbara Haene: At the Jewish Museum of Switzerland, the EJDC begins on 1 September 2024 with a Jewish-Muslim guided tour. We have been offering these guided tours for school classes since spring 2024. Two guides, one of Jewish origin and one of Muslim origin, show the similarities and differences between Islam and Judaism. Due to the high demand, we have decided to offer this guided tour to adults as part of the JECJ event.
What other events are planned?
In our Repair Café, you can mend damaged textiles under the expert guidance of a seamstress. At 2pm, Christina Meri, the curator of our museum, will be talking to Daniel Teichmann about a volume of a Hebrew Bible that was printed in Basel in 1618 and used by a Jewish family in Endingen-Lengnau, before arriving in the Netherlands in the 1940s via unknown routes. Other venues in Basel and eight other Swiss cities will also be offering a varied programme, including a guided tour of the Basel Jewish cemetery, a lecture on the biographies of Jewish families from Sulzburg in the liberal Jewish community of Migwan, and concerts of Klezmer music at the Jewish Museum in Basel, Endingen and Lausanne. A conference in Zurich will focus on Jewish-Christian links in German literature. In the library of Zurich’s Jewish community (Israelitische Cultusgemeinde Zürich), the Jewish family dog will be the focus of an event, and writer Charles Lewinsky will be reading passages from ‘Melnitz’, his famous family saga. This year there will also be opportunities to take part in guided tours of synagogues in a number of cities. The synagogues of Berne, Delémont, Lausanne, La-Chaux-de-Fonds and Geneva (on 15 September) will be opening their doors to interested visitors. You can find the full programme here: https://www.juedisches-museum.ch/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Broschu%CC%88re_-ETJK_2024.pdf.
Have you seen a resurgence of interest in Swiss Jewish culture in recent years?
Yes, since the end of the pandemic, we have seen an increased interest in Jewish culture and history. Switzerland decided in 2023 to erect a national memorial to the Swiss victims of National Socialism, and our events linked to genealogical research into the second and third generations of Holocaust survivors have been very well received. The Jewish Museum of Switzerland will be moving to a larger building in 2025, with the financial support of the City of Basel.
Can you tell us about some of the museum’s recent acquisitions?
We recently received objects from the Jewish department stores Loeb (Berne) and Au Louvre (Morat), including fashion catalogues, advertising shots, jubilee publications and a very fine leporello of embroidery motifs dating from the period between 1890 and 1910. These scrolls testify to the economic importance of modern Jewish department stores in Switzerland from the 1890s onwards.