How Russia Created a Jewish Tolerance Center Even Vladimir Putin Can Tolerate

Olga Gershenson

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Today, post-Communist Europe is experiencing a museum boom. Countries are trying to consolidate a collective identity in museums that tell their nation’s story in a way that was not possible under communism. Jewish museums and Holocaust memorials offer not only histories of Jewish communities in a given town or country, but also a perspective on the place of those communities within a larger national history and a country’s self-understanding. For decades, the subject of Jewish history and memory was largely off-limits in the Eastern bloc. However, since the fall of communism there has been a revival of public Jewish culture and institutions in the region. New museums, memorials and education centers have emerged all across Central and Eastern Europe as well as in the former Soviet Union.

One of the most ambitious is the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012. A multimillion dollar endeavor, the museum is supported by Jewish donors as well as by non-Jewish benefactors, foundations and local authorities. Its core exhibitions, which rely on the expertise of both local and international scholars and designers, offer an affecting multimedia narrative of Russian Jewish history. In the short time since it was established, Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center has become part of the international museum scene and a tourist attraction, with 85,000 visitors in 2014.

Major museums are usually expensive undertakings, involving legislation, fundraising and planning, and as such they reflect a society’s agenda. The elements of a museum — architecture, curatorial choices and exhibit design — all convey its political narrative. History museums are cultural documents offering a glimpse of the past, which they are ostensibly trying to preserve, as well as of the present. Naturally, a Jewish museum in Russia has to grapple with local historical and cultural heritage and to stake a claim in the national past: Which stories are told in its displays? What is highlighted and what is omitted? How is the Jewish story integrated with the broader national narrative?

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While in early Soviet times, synagogues (as well as churches) were turned into stables and barns, in Moscow a garage was turned into a Jewish museum. Granted, this was no ordinary garage. The Soviet avant-garde architect Konstantin Melnikov designed the historic Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage in 1926.

The museum project was initiated by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia — the umbrella organization for Chabad-Lubavitch in Russia — supported by the Kremlin and financed by a handful of Russian Jewish oligarchs at a cost of $50 million. The journey to museum from garage began in 2001, when Moscow City Hall donated the dilapidated building to the Hasidic Jewish Community Center. The idea was that the building would house a cultural center, including an exhibition on Jewish culture and an art gallery. While this site is neither central nor easily accessible to tourists, it is part of an entire campus of Jewish religious and cultural organizations that sprouted in the post-Soviet era in the traditionally Jewish neighborhood (to the extent that Moscow has Jewish neighborhoods) of Maryina Roshcha. The museum building shares its territory with a Jewish day school, a yeshiva, a medical center and several Jewish charity organizations.

Several years of faltering attempts to renovate the garage building ended in 2007, when Roman Abramovich, a federation board member, restored it. In 2008 it opened its doors to the public as the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, managed by Dasha Zhukova, Abramovich’s girlfriend at the time. While the art center was there only temporarily, the name stuck. The institution is still known in Moscow as “the Garage.”

The federation had a vision for the future museum, which the Russian chief rabbi, Berel Lazar of Chabad-Lubavitch, discussed in an official conversation with Vladimir Putin in June 2007. Lazar, known for his close relationship with Putin, emphasized the necessity of creating a museum that would not only educate new generations of Russians in the spirit of tolerance, but also celebrate Russia as a model of the co-existence of different religions in a multinational and multi-confessional society.

Putin was so moved by this idea that he donated one month of his salary toward the creation of the museum. Shortly after this, the FSB (the Federal Security Service, formerly the KGB) pledged its support by providing documents from its archives. Close ties between the Chabad-Lubavitch leadership and Putin’s regime, as well as Putin’s widely publicized support, created the perception that the museum-in-the-making would be an officially sanctioned institution, even though it would be created with private funds. Indeed, the final exhibits tell a story that is consistent with the regime’s customary positive portrayal of Russia to the West. To that end, the museum positions Jews as a model minority.

To implement this vision, the federation wanted the museum to be designed on the principles of “edutainment,” where visitors could learn the history of Russian Jewry in a fun way. The federation retained Ralph Appelbaum Associates, an international design firm with experience working on major Holocaust and Jewish museums. RAA was charged with creating a world-class museum using cutting-edge digital technology and interactivity. The exhibition was to address the widest possible audiences to appeal not only to Russian Jews, a very small minority today, but also to non-Jewish Russians, tourists and, most important, young audiences.

Aside from a modest collection of Judaica and art, the new museum had no curators, collections or research, only a budget, a building and a deadline.

To create the museum content from scratch, RAA put together a content committee consisting of five international scholars in the field of Russian Jewish history and in Jewish religion and culture. Many other scholars were brought in for consultation and for filmed interviews, which were later featured in the exhibits.

The museum was created in record time — less than four years from start to finish; by contrast, the core exhibition of the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews was more than 10 years in the making. To satisfy the client’s vision of a museum as a popular educational attraction, RAA decided to use a multimedia narrative approach. The starting point would be not only original, valuable objects or works of art, but also reconstructed artifacts, film, sound, immersive installations and interactive presentations of various kinds.

The exhibition, located on a floor of enormous size, about 92,000 square feet, presents more than 2,000 years of history, including a detailed multimedia timeline of 230 years of the history of Jews in Russia. There are about 5,000 photographs, 200 artifacts, 34 films, 32 digital interactives, six listening stations, eight custom maps and a 4-D theater with an animated film. The texts are in Russian and English, with occasional Hebrew and Yiddish. The multimedia exhibits are supplemented with some original objects collected in the area of the former Pale of Settlement. To say the least, this is an unprecedented undertaking. Although there are other smaller and more traditional Jewish museums in Russia, this is the first one on such a scale. It is also the first interactive and multimedia museum anywhere in the country.

Committed to the Cause: Vladimir Putin reportedly donated a month’s salary towards the creation of the museum.

Read more: How Russia Created a…

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