The Jewish Museum in downtown Budapest is set to undergo its first major change in decades, the Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary (Mazsihisz) announced on Tuesday.
The museum – which is adjacent to the city’s historic, and massive, Dohány Street Synagogue – has not updated its core exhibition since 1984 but plans on doing so in September thanks to donations from a variety of individuals and foundations.
“We believe that a museum is not a mausoleum, which conserves a dead culture,” the Jewish Museum said in a statement. “It is a living organism [and] a place of reinterpretation and questioning.
The curators described the new exhibition, which will be accompanied by a smartphone guide app, as focused on the “core motifs” of “Jewish time and space” embodied in the Jewish calendar and Diaspora culture.
“Our exhibition meets the legacy of the commentary-tradition of the Talmud and the museum visit as a ’multimedial-experience.’ Thus the visitor can contemplate the objects, read about them on the captions, and interpret the surrounding space at a time,” the museum explained. “The sustainable design of the exhibition also propagates the same message. It is a lego-like, mobile structure, making it possible for us to create a constant dialogue with the present via newer and newer objects.”
The new core exhibition is the second phase of the museum’s planned renewal, following last year’s inauguration of the “100 years, 100 objects” historical exhibition commemorating the museum’s centenary.