Walking in the footsteps of Vrba and Wetzler, Part 3
by Zoe Hilton-Webb and Max Martel, Vrba-Wetzler memorial march participants In August 2015, a group of people from all over the world gathered to walk from Auschwitz to Zilina, in memory of the arduous journey Rudolf Vrba and Jozef Lanik undertook after escaping Auschwitz concentration camp. Below are the accounts of two young walk participants – one […]
Walking in the footsteps of Vrba and Wetzler, Part 2
by Radek Hejret, organiser of the Vrba-Wetzler memorial march As we stood at the edge of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, approximately at the place where on 7 April 1944 two Slovak Jews, Walter Rosenberg (Rudolf Vrba) and Fredie Wetzler (Jozef Lanik), hid before they escaped from Auschwitz, the seventy year old Fedor Gal, initiator of the idea […]
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 […]