Lending objects from the collection to other institutions means the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust (MJH) participates in exhibitions that reach audiences far beyond our building.
Objects from our collections are currently on loan to three separate institutions: The National Museum of American Jewish History (NMAJH) in Philadelphia, the Jewish Museum in New York City, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg.
In Philadelphia, the NMAJH exhibition Leonard Bernstein: The Power of Music is the first large-scale museum exhibition to explore the famed conductor and composer’s life, his Jewish identity, and his social activism. On loan from the Museum is a flyer donated to us by singer Henny Durmashkin (her daughter, Rita Lerner, is a Museum trustee). The flyer is from a spring 1948 concert in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. Ms. Durmashkin sang at this concert, where Leonard Bernstein conducted an orchestra of Holocaust survivors called the Representative Orchestra of the Surviving Remnant.
The Jewish Museum in New York City recently opened its new core exhibition, Scenes from the Collection, which displays two objects on loan from MJH. The first is a graphic design piece by Peter Loewenstein, who perished in the Holocaust, called Galanteriewaren-Werkstaette Produktion. This piece will be rotating out of the exhibition and will be replaced with the second MJH loan called Beautification Before the Arrival of the Red Cross Commission. This picture, donated to MJH by Helga Weissova, was painted by Ms. Weissova while she was interned at Terezin.
And at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, MJH loans are in their gallery that focuses genocide. Items include ration books and the anti-Semitic children’s book Trau keinem Fuchs auf gruener Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid (Trust No Fox on the Green Heath and No Jew by His Oath). These loans will continue through 2020, with objects rotating on and off display.