Walking in the footsteps of Vrba and Wetzler, Part 1
by Zoe Hilton-Webb In March 2015 Gerta Vrbova spoke at the Jewish Museum London about her first husband, Rudolf Vrba, and his escape from Auschwitz concentration camp. This talk was one of the first in a series of events leading up to a memorial march from Auschwitz to Zilina in August 2015. Over the next few […]
Volunteer Trip to Dulwich Picture Gallery
by Kimberley Coates, Visitor Services and Volunteer Manager On Friday 15 January the Jewish Museum volunteers took a well-earned day off and, along with the Visitor Services Team (and curatorial reps), went on a day trip to Dulwich Picture Gallery. The trip celebrated our volunteer’s hard work over the past year: 2015 was the busiest […]
Memory Quilts – Giving History a Human Face
by Alice McDermott, Learning Team Intern During Alice’s time as a Learning Team Intern at the museum she worked on producing resource packs for our Memory Quilts: Triumph Over Adversity exhibition. These packs explore in depth the stories of some of the Holocaust survivors (’The Boys’) whose lives are represented on the quilts. Having spent […]
Cat Chat and Tiger Talk – What Visitors Thought of our Judith Kerr Exhibition
by Alice Quine, Assistant Curator As part of the museum’s exhibition on children’s author and illustrator Judith Kerr, visitors were encouraged to leave their thoughts and opinions on the exhibition. Little did we know this unsuspecting feedback book would be filled with a wonderful array of literary and artistic tributes to both Judith and her […]
Judeans under the floor
by Elisabeth Murray, Curatorial Intern Objects come into a museum in a variety of ways. Sometimes they are given only on loan (like most of the objects in our new crowd-sourced exhibition Sacrifice), occasionally they are purchased in an auction, which normally results in a few tense moments of bidding, and sometimes we get really […]
Animating the Museum
by Alice Quine, Assistant Curator Last month the Jewish Museum and Chocolate Films hosted a week-long animation workshop focusing on objects in our collection. During the week 17 young people, aged 12 to 21, got to look behind the scenes, exploring the museum stores and thinking about how museums collect objects. They then researched ten […]
The Battle of Waterloo
by Phoebe Newman, Museum Administrator Our recent partnership with the Jewish Military Museum has made us think in more depth about Jewish military history. A few weeks ago it was the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo, so I had a rummage around to find some objects in our collection that reflect the Jewish involvement […]
End of Year Report
by Judith Vandervelde, Senior Educator Now the school year has come to an end, we are looking back at all the amazing workshops we have shared with over 14,000 students from schools across the country (and even further afield). This wordle illustrates the words most often used by teachers on feedback forms to describe our […]
The Tiger Who Came to High Tea
by Alice Quine, Assistant Curator For our recently opened exhibition on Judith Kerr I was tasked with acquiring wooden props for the Tiger Kitchen set. Little did I know that this fun, if slightly bizarre task would throw up a whole smorgasbord of mental mahogany meals. When I was a child, mud pies were the […]