Opinion: Museum’s closure is one big and embarrassing shock

The Jewish Museum in Camden holds a special place in our family life. My wife, Tricia Brummer, a puppeteer and textile artist, has performed there many times with her theatre, Pomegranate Puppets, and repertoire of original Jewish folk tales, some built around the cycle of festivals. 

My daughter, Jessica Rosenfield, is a museum educator and consultant who worked with the Camden site over many years.

The museum’s financial struggles have never been a great secret, but the suddenness of the closure decision is a huge shock. It was not made any more credible by the public relations spin of reopening again on a larger scale in a central London location in three to five years time. To someone who has spent a lifetime in journalism digesting corporate announcements, this looks fatuous.

How embarrassing for British Jewry, which is so proud of institutional strength, from the Board of Deputies to Limmud learning and the Willesden Jewish Cemetery and the vast array of charities that this should have come to pass.

At its modest Camden location, the Jewish Museum was never going to compete with some of the great cultural equivalents on the continent or the United States. The magnificent Daniel Liebeskind-designed Jewish Museum in Berlin is an architectural treasure and offers free entry. In Krakow, the former Oskar Shindler factory has been converted into an arts centre and wonderful history of Polish and European Jewry.

The London Jewish Museum is much less grand than these cousins, both of which (for Shoah-related reasons) enjoy generous state funding. But in its own way, it is a smaller, meaningful treasure house of British-Jewish culture and has enjoyed some hefty donations from the UK Arts Council. In many ways, its attractiveness is the sheer variety of its collections, its intimacy and its ability to mount exhibitions of the Jewish contribution to broader British culture, from music to literature.

As somebody involved in three minority Jewish charities in Britain (two of them media-related), I know how hard and dispiriting fundraising can be. Yet the trustees of these organisations never tire in their efforts and, as a result, have been able to modernise, change and survive the impact of the pandemic and the recent great inflation.

When it comes to culture in Britain, there are no shortage of generous Jewish benefactors, for example Lloyd Dorfman and the Djanogly family at the Tate Modern and John Ritblat and his family at the Wallace Collection and National Portrait Gallery.

Greenwich’s National Maritime Museum owes an enormous debt of gratitude to shipping tycoon Sammy Ofer. Somerset House has been endowed by the late Edmond Safra. The Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum are testimony to the charitable giving of exiled Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.

There is not a cultural institution in the London arts, theatre and music in London – and I daresay the rest of the UK – that is not in receipt of donations and grants from Jewish charitable foundations. It is extraordinary that emergency funds could not be raised to keep the Camden Museum going until a more ambitious project can replace it.

The Museum of London (which has had great Jewish exhibits) did not have to close while a move to more suitable premises in nearby Smithfield was designed and organised.

From the Jewish Museum in Camden, to the failure (so far) to get the Holocaust Memorial at Victoria Palace Gardens over the line, our community struggles to get things done. If we can make such a mark in the secular exhibitions, why the hesitation to celebrate and commemorate our own heritage and achievements?