Voices Places Times

Voices_Places_Times. Jews in Munich

The permanent exhibition Voices_Places_Times provides information on Munich’s Jewish history, past and present, providing visitors with new impulses and animating them to enter into dialog with the exhibits. In seven installations, the habitual way of looking at Jewish history, culture, and religion is questioned and opened to discussion through the voices of contemporary witnesses, ritual objects, photographs, videos, and comic strips. In this way Munich’s Jewish history is visably shown to be an integral part of the city’s past while attention is drawn to incisive events, interruptions, and gaps in this history at the same time.

The first installation VOICES tells of the arrival of Jewish families and different individuals over the past 200 years. Each of the audio tracks introduces the story of a person’s life which led them to Munich or brought them into contact with the city for a few years. The installations PLACES and PICTURES point to places on the city map of Munich which were important in the paths followed by different individuals and show snap-shots from the lives of Munich’s Jewish citizens, from the Nobel Prize Winner in Chemistry to emigrants and the Congregation’s rabbis.

The exhibition section RITUALS provides an introduction to religious traditions in the family and in the synagogue with the help of Jewish ritual objects, while also taking a look at Jewish festivals and religious holidays.

A COMIC by the cartoonist Jordan B. Gorfinkel focusses on the new start to Jewish life after 1945, coming full circle in an entertaining way right up to the present day.

Curators: Jutta Fleckenstein and Bernhard Purin

Exhibition design: Architekt Martin Kohlbauer, Vienna