Jewish Museum reopens where visitors can read refugees’ stories

Menorah Cleaned At London Jewish Museum Ahead Of Re-opening
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The historic legacy of anti-semitism will be on show for the public to see when the London Jewish Museum reopens on Sunday July 11.

The building in Camden, which was closed for 15 months during lockdown, has set up a new reading room where staff, visitors and volunteers will slowly start to sort through an archive detailing the stories of Jewish refugees to post World War II London.

Hundreds of cards and forms filled in by migrants who arrived at the Jews Temporary Shelter in Aldgate, east London, will be sorted through and eventually be digitised.

One of thousands of Jews' temporary shelter documents is seen at the Jewish Museum
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The shelter, which was set up in 1885, offered temporary accommodation to new arrivals and medical help as well as trying to find them work and somewhere more permanent to live.

Interim museum director Frances Jeens said the paperwork was “a snapshot” of British Jewish history.

She said: “It’s a database of everyone who came through the shelters so we’ve got their names, their birthplace and nationality. “Though a lot of people have a birthplace the nationality is stateless because they came from Poland where they were considered as Polish people to be stateless post-war.

“We have their age and what we are finding is there is a lot of very young people who had presumably either been in hiding or survived concentration camps.”

She said she hoped visitors would enjoy the “curated experience” of seeing how the museum uses archives to bring history to life and “experience what the museum does behind the scenes”.

She added: “It’s one of the things we learned from lockdown, because we were all live-streaming from our homes and people loved it, they love seeing all the behind the scenes and the human aspect of it so I think more and more we are going to be doing behind the scenes work and giving people the ability to feel it’s accessible for them.

“I think for audiences it’s the feeling that you are seeing something which otherwise would never be seen. Most museums can only display a small percentage of what they have in their stores and it’s always nice to feel you are behind the curtain looking in.”

:: Tickets to visit the museum are available from www.jewishmuseum.org.uk

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