c. 1996 Religion News Service

LOS ANGELES (RNS)-The world’s fourth-largest Jewish museum opened here Sunday (April 21), with its founding president expressing the hope that the teaching of Jewish history will help Jews recover their waning sense of community.

Built at a cost of $65 million, funded largely through donations from the Jewish community, the Skirball Cultural Center is a 125,000-square-foot museum complex that includes a children’s center, temporary exhibition space, an auditorium, a conference center and classrooms.

With 25,000 artifacts gathered over 120 years by Hebrew Union College, the Skirball center’s collection rivals the holdings of Jewish museums in Prague, New York and Jerusalem.

The museum is named for Jack and Audrey Skirball. He was a Reform rabbi who later became a motion-picture producer and real estate developer. His foundation supplied the initial financial support for the museum project.

Since 1972, the Skirball collection was housed-largely out of public sight-in a 6,000-square-foot facility. Skirball president Uri Herscher, a Reform rabbi and professor of Jewish-American history, hopes the expanded location will make the collection more accessible to Jews, many of whom have lost touch with their cultural roots. Herscher also hopes the museum will attract Christians and other non-Jews.

Some critics say the museum tried too hard to be accessible. Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Los Angeles correspondent Tom Tugend said the museum”explains everything about Judaism and Jewish life in the simplest terms.” However, Herscher said that approach was necessary because many in the Los Angeles Jewish community have married non-Jews and have lost touch with their Judaic roots.”In the Los Angeles area alone, there are 600,000 Jews, which makes it the second-largest community in the United States after New York City,”said Herscher, former executive vice president of the four-campus Hebrew Union College.”Close to 80 percent of these Jews … have no ties to any Jewish organization or institution, no activity in their lives that is specifically Jewish.” Herscher blames this estrangement in part on television, which he said dissolves community ties by gluing people to their living-room couches.”We have to be realistic that the text no longer reaches the masses,”Herscher said.”The competition with television is enormous. This isn’t just in Jewish life. It’s learning in general.” Rather than fight the multimedia age, Herscher said the center’s multimedia exhibits bring Jewish history and culture more readily into the hearts and minds of the museum’s visitors.”The visual has to take priority,”Herscher said,”though not exclusive of the text.” The main gallery houses a permanent exhibition entitled”Visions & Values: Jewish Life from Antiquity to America.”The gallery reverberates with a cacophony of computer and video exhibits, offering visitors a narrative of Jewish-American history.

Exhibits in the Discovery Center offer visitors guided tours of archaeological digs in the Holy Land via touch-screen computer terminals, complete with lifelike digital archaeologists who live inside CD-ROMs.

In the”Visions & Values”gallery are a variety of video exhibits. One uses home movies to show how ordinary Jews celebrate holidays-Sukkot, Passover and Purim. Another exhibit, in the”Liberty and Immigration”gallery, shows grainy black-and-white newsreels of early 20th-century Jews being processed through Ellis Island in New York.

The”Opportunity Theater”displays a sober series of documentary narratives on Jewish life before World War II. The”At Home in America”exhibit is built around an eight-screen video-bank kaleidoscope, suspended eight feet overhead, with images-organized around themes from the Wisdom books of the Hebrew Bible-of Jewish entertainers, political activists and ordinary people.

At the end of the”At Home”exhibit, viewers can enter a video-recording booth and leave brief vignettes of their own experiences, which the museum may later use as part of the exhibition.

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More high-tech exhibitions and programs are planned. The center will soon have a home page on the World Wide Web. And in August, Herscher said, ground will be broken on a communications center that will use a satellite to broadcast educational programming from the Skirball Center all over the world.”The goal is to globalize this institution,”Herscher said.”I’d like to be as ambitious as possible to go beyond the American shores.” Beside all the electronics, the Skirball Center also offers traditional exhibits.

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The museum displays two impressive replicas of ancient archaeological sites, complete with pottery and other artifacts. One depicts an eighth century B.C. tomb excavated at Khirbet el-Qom. The other replicates the ruins of a third century A.D. synagogue in Tiberias, a city on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

The museum also displays more contemporary artifacts.

The centerpiece of the”Synagogue”gallery is an almost full-size replica of the Holy Shrine at the New Synagogue of Berlin. Originally completed in 1866, the New Synagogue was the largest in the world until its destruction during the Allied bombing of Berlin in 1943.

And in the”Liberty and Immigration”gallery, alongside a life-sized, fiberglass replica of the torch-bearing hand of the Statue of Liberty, are replicas of benches used by early 20th-century immigrants at Ellis Island. Herscher had the benches reconstructed out of”leftover pieces of wood with rusty nails”that the Ellis Island Museum shipped to him.”This is kind of symbolic of America,”Herscher said. Jewish immigrants”were leftovers who came here and are still trying to create a whole. You can do a lot with leftovers, if you have the passion to do it, and you care to do it and you’re talented enough to do it.” Smaller exhibit cases profile pioneering Jewish figures-such as Albert Einstein, blue-jean tycoon Levi Strauss and social worker Lillian Wald.

But the center’s most powerful exhibit is its poignant, minimalist sojourn through the Holocaust.

The enclosed, apostrophe-shaped exhibit is painted black. The only light in the small chamber illuminates large black-and-white photographs of six Holocaust victims, men and women from three generations. At the end of the line of photographs is a mounted inscription:”Six of Six Million.”In the oval center of the exhibit is a black podium in which an eternal flame, springing from a candle, floats on water.

While some might complain that such a small exhibit does not do justice to the atrocities Jews suffered, Herscher said the aim is to show the humanity of the victims.”We made a decision,”said Herscher.”We often don’t want to confront evil. But you can’t help but see yourself in these photographs. Your eyes meet the eyes of the victims. That was also the reason we chose six. Six million is just incomprehensible. … You look at them and say, it could have been you. It could have been Uri Herscher.” (STORY CAN END HERE. OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS)

Besides the fixed exhibits, the Skirball center will sponsor art and writing classes, theater and poetry programs and scholarly conferences-all with the overriding mission of reintegrating an alienated Jewish-American diaspora.”We are competing for leisure time,”Herscher said.”Perhaps Jewish leaders haven’t found the formula that attracts these people, who are wonderfully intelligent good citizens, but whose story was interrupted because parents and grandparents didn’t convey the story.”So it’s a matter of how do you find a surrogate storyteller. We hope this institution represents that.”

MJP END AQUINO