Living Well Travel Telling A Story New Jewish Museum-Berlin offers "between the lines" historical look. ture and exhibits. Architect Libeskind has his own name for the museum. He calls it "Between the lines. I call it that because it is a project about two lines of thinking and organization and about relationship. One is a straight line, but broken into many fragments; the other is a tortuous line but con- tinuing indefinitely." Indeed, besides the broken lines that pummel the exterior of the building — that many see as the pieces of a broken Jewish star — cutting through the interior is a Void, a straight line whose impenetrability forms the cen- tral focus around which the exhibi- tions are organized. The museum contains 3,800 objects — a third of which are on loan. Shaike Weinberg, the founding director of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, was instru- mental in creating the concept for the permanent exhibit. "A lot of American Jews contributed," Bodemann-Ostow says. "American Jewish people feel very attached to a museum that will JUDITH DONER BERNE Special to the Jewish News Berlin T he opening of the Jewish Museum-Berlin, starting Sunday, Sept. 9, has such huge implications for Germany and world Jewry that it will be staged over four days. It leads off with a "political open- ing" for political, business and cultur- al leaders from Germany and abroad. Monday is the "emotional opening" for those who donated and loaned their memories and memorabilia. Tuesday is the "student opening" for 250 high school students from Berlin and Brandenburg, followed by a "pub- lic opening" from 7 p.m. Tuesday to 1 a.m. Wednesday. The museum then will be open from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily except for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Christmas Eve. The main building and its striking The Jewish Museum-Berlin. design by Daniel Libeskind, who was born in Poland and lost most of his family in the Holocaust, has made architectural headlines ever since it opened its exhibit-less halls in the winter of 1999. More than 300,000 people toured it before it closed to install the permanent collection. In fact, as I waited at its side door to be cleared for my appointment with a museum press representative last month a bus carrying architecture students from Japan unloaded. They had to be settle for examining the building's exte- rior. So did I. However, I was treated to some firsthand details by Naomi Bodemann- Ostow, a young Jewish woman from the United States, who helps handle the museum's press relations. Since one of her parents is American and the other German, she holds dual-citizenship. She is one of nearly 100,000 Jews who have chosen to live in Germany, 12,000 of them in Berlin. "Eighty percent are immigrants from Russia," she says. "I actually prefer Germany to the states," she tells me quite frankly. 'It's such an exciting time here. Berlin is a new capitol. My generation of Germans can hardly understand how the Holocaust could have happened." The museum's approach, she explains, "is mainly chronological, but broken up with a couple of sections not fixed to a certain time." Museum Director W. Michael Blumenthal says the exhibits will highlight "the 2,000-year history of Jews in Germany with its high points and low points; Judaism and Jewish life; the devastating consequences of the Holocaust and the hesitant new beginnings of Jewish life in Germany." More than 60 years have passed since the Gestapo closed Berlin's first Jewish museum and confiscated the inventories. But this is not a Holocaust Museum, although that devastating period looms large in both its architec- 9/7 2001 92 tell their story." And the museum, she explains, is set up "to tell a story, not just show objects." She describes a circumcision set inscribed with Hebrew lettering of German words and a circumcision bank bearing the German eagle — both from the late 1800s. "It shows the attempt to assimilate." Although the hype has been about the Libeskind structure, the museum is actually two buildings. Visitors will enter the permanent collection from the contrasting baroque building next door. In 1962, it became the "Berlin Museum" that eventually grew to include a section on Berlin's Jews. Now, it will be used for special events, changing exhibitions and to house the museum shop and restaurant, Bodemann-Ostow says. teilfiggaiM Museum officials expect debate "if the exam- ple of other recently opened national museums is anything to go by," says Ken Gorbey, muse- urn project director. "Indeed the liveliness of the debate will be an important indicator of just how successful the Jewish Museum Berlin is in C4 raising public awareness and levels of under- standing." Judy Berne holds materials detailing the Berlin museum's , ❑ Judith Doner Berne is a West Bloomfield resident. •• opening.