The Journey: Online Tour
THE JOURNEY FILM TIMINGS: THE JOURNEY film timings.docx
סרטון הסיור:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/12rqxKeUrqFc_Y-CgS6y-UJOVUyGy_gmJ/view?usp=share_link
Question: Chat question: Ask them to write the answer in chat.
Question: They can raise their hands or give a reaction. For thought. No requirement to write in chat.
| Welcome to ANU My name Use chat for questions New museum Openend March 2021 72,000 square feet $100 million Seconf Floor – History First Temple destroyed Babylon Second Temple Return to Jerusalem 585 in Second Temple Destroyed in 70 CE Last stand at Masada 73CE Josephus Flavius Return to Babylon Language other than Hebrew People without a land Beginning of wandering Spain Difficulties under different rulers Moors allowed Jews to flourish Jewish life in these times from murals Move to Christian Spain 1147 1478 start of Inquisition August 2, 1492 Expulsion of Jews from Spain Portugal and expulsion 1496 Moved other places Megillah is created at this time of movement European scroll by a scribe from Spaiin Early modern period Jews move to Poland/ Lithuania/ Ottoman Empire Cochin Synagogue 1568 Torah scroll cover from Cochin Chodorov, example of town in Ashkanaz Chodorov Synagouge built in 1652, painted 1714 Wooden synagogue Local culture and Jewish culture combined Use of rabbits to represent Jews Done half a century after Khmelnitsky massacres of 1654-1649 Strokes are national good luck symbol of Poland Recreation of ceiling via photos from early 20th century Original burned in WWII Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam 1672 Jews from this community established many new communities across the globe Ottoman Empire Megillah comes to Moroco The Big Dress shows history roots of Spain Ties to Spain connect us to Megillah Moroco has 180,000 Jews moving to Israel Zionism Poale Zion flag Russia 1917 represents Zionist Marxist ideals for Israel Ben Gurion was one of leaders of Poale Zion Holocaust and travels after to Israel Travel documents and identity Mimran family of Yavne Donats object ot ANU so we can share its story | The Journey Tour Hello and welcome to ANU, the Museum of the Jewish People located on the beautiful campus of Tel Aviv University in Israel. We are so excited to have you with us for an Online Highlights Tour of our museum. My name is _____ and I will be showing you around. This tour will last around 40-45 minutes, with time for questions throughout and at the end of the tour. Thank you to _______ (client organization) for having us on today. Before we begin the tour, there are a few important logistic points to review: In just a moment, I will be sharing my screen and we will figuratively walk through the museum together. Just like our in-person tours, our online tours are filled with questions and opportunities to share our own stories and learn from others in the group. I will be asking you questions throughout the tour, and you are welcome to answer them, or ask questions of your own as we go along. If you feel comfortable doing so, please write your questions and answers in the chat, which can be found by clicking the ‘chat’ button at the bottom of the screen. If you prefer to ask a question anonymously, you can send me a question directly instead of to the whole group. Please keep yourself on mute throughout the tour for the convenience of others. Now, let’s get started! Question: Raise your hand if you have been to Israel before? Now raise your hand if you have been to ANU, which was previously called Beit Hatfutsot or Diaspora Museum, before? Question: If you have been to our museum before, write which year you were here in the chat. Our new museum opened to the public in March of 2021 after a ten year, $100 million-dollar renovation with over 72,000 square feet of exhibition space with countless artifacts from around the globe and displays of the unique as well as the everyday, modern and ancient Judicia, and art. We have 40 specially produced films, and 25 interactives across 4 wings spanning 3 floors waiting to welcome you. So, without further ado, let's start exploring! We begin our journey on our second floor, where we talk about Jewish History. The first thing that I would like to do is share a 7 minute film with you that covers Jewish History from the beginning until today. Enjoy! When we talk about Jewish History we have an endless amount of information and locations that we can talk about. What I would like to do is take one, small, precious object from our museum and follow its history from its start to its home, here in ANU Museum of the Jewish People on the campus of Tel Aviv University in Israel. Before I introduce you to our artifact, let's cover the Jewish history that brings us the place and time it was created. As we saw in the film, following the destruction of the First Temple, the Jews settled the region between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, in a city called Babylon in a state called Mesopotamia. This period is known as the Babylonian captivity. When Jerusalem was rebuilt, the Jews went back to their homeland, but a center remained in Babylon. The Second Temple was built and made beautiful and ten years after Herod’s death in 4 BCE, Judea came under direct Roman administration. The Jews grew angry under the Roman suppression of Jewish life and there was sporadic violence which escalated into a full-scale revolt in 66 CE. Roman forces led by Titus were finally victorious, razing Jerusalem and the Second Temple, which had stood for 585 years, to the ground in 70 CE and defeating the last Jewish outpost at Masada in 73 CE where nearly 1,000 Jewish men, women and children, who had survived the destruction of Jerusalem, occupied and fortified King Herod's mountain top palace complex of Masada near the Dead Sea, where they held out for three years against repeated Roman attempts to conquer them. When the Romans finally scaled Masada and broke through its walls, they found that the defenders and their families had chosen to die by their own hands rather than be enslaved. Their defeat was the end of Jewish life as a Temple based people with a spiritual center. Our wandering had begun. The total destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple was catastrophic for the Jewish people. According to Josephus Flavius, born Joseph Ben Matthias as a Jew in Jerusalem, hundreds of thousands of Jews perished in the siege of Jerusalem and elsewhere in the country, and many thousands more were sold into slavery. Although the Temple had been destroyed and Jerusalem burned to the ground and "plowed up with a yoke of oxen," the Jews and Judaism survived the encounter with Rome.After the destruction of the Second Temple, there was a wide dispersion of Jews in which many ended up back in the community they had formed after the destruction of the first Tempe, back to Babylon. It is here where Jews would, for the first time, write prayers in a language other than Hebrew, such as the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, written in Judeo-Aramaic – the first of the many languages in which Jewish prayers in the diaspora would come to be written in, such as Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, Turkish, Amharic, Yiddish, Ladino and even later English. Babylon became the center of Jewish religion and culture in exile and became the focus of Judaism for more than a thousand years. It is where Jews would define themselves as "a people without a land". It is where the story of the Jewish travels begins and where our story begins. The Jews of Babylon were looking to move to other lands where other opportunities and freedom might be found. One land of opportunity was Spain. The first Jewish settlers in Spain can be traced to Merida. In the beginning life in Spain was difficult for the Jews under the Barbarians and then by a string of Kings that eventually converted to Christinanity. There were forced conversions, kidnappings of Jewish children, and death sentences placed on the Jewish community. The Jews rejoiced in the Moors conquests of Spain. Life under Moors Muslim rule allowed the Jews in Spain to flourish and brought many moe Jews to the country. These Spanish Jews became active in the fields of astronomy, medicine, and mathematics. The Jews of Spain, being multilingual, urban, and literate, filled an economic niche in the predominantly agricultural economy and also played an important role in the circulation of goods and ideas from the Arabic- to the Latin-speaking world. As we can see from these beautiful murals that adorn our Jewish Centers of the Middle Ages: sephard and Ashkenaz Gallery, life for Jewish in these locations revolved around their small communities where they lived by choice or because they were required to. The Jews were a seperate group that did not often mix with the local population. We can see here life in Europe came with restrictions, look at the men's hats. They were required to distinguish themselves from their Christiona neighbors. Here we see hats, other places had other distinguishing requirements, such as certain colors, or belts. The towns were relatively self-sufficient with all the needs of the community met within its borders. Most of the Jews of Spain lived predominantly under Muslim rule from 711 until the late eleventh century, when the Almoravid dynasty began to implement anti-Jewish legislation. With the invasion of the Almohads from North Africa and their imposition of Islam on Jews and Christians in 1147, the Jews fled to Christian Spain. We can see in this mural, which is across from the first one that we looked at, that Jewish life at this time was also relatively contained within the Jewish cities and towns. In the Ottoman Empire we also see our Jewish life via towns where Jews lived together, either by choice, convenience, for safety, or by government decree. These Spanish Jews remained under Christian rule in an increasingly precarious position as the Middle Ages progressed. In 1478 a national Inquisition was established in Spain, designed, in part, to ferret out those forced converts who were secretly practicing Judaism. When Granada fell in January 1492, the dream of the Spanish monarchs to unite the peninsula in one Christian community was almost realized. In March 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella decreed the expulsion of the Jews. On August 2, the same day that Christopher Columbus set out on his journey of discovery, the Jews of Spain were either converted to Christianity or forced into exile. Most of the expelled Jews settled first in Portugal, which was close by and similar to Spain in language and culture, then followed suit and expelled them in 1496. Many Jews from Portugal ended up in Northern Europe, England or Flanders. This is where our Journey begins!!! Let me introduce you to a very special Megillah of Esther where the story of Mordechi, Haman and Esther is read on the Jewish Holiday of Purim. Let's hear from our Chief Curator, Dr. Orit Shoham-Gover who will tell us about this amazing artifact: We can see from the parchment and the style of writing that the scroll was forged in Europe by a scribe that had learned his trade in Spain. The Ashkenazi influences in the writing suggests that it was written after the expelled Jews settled in a Western European Ashkenazi community. This part of our story is a bit murky, so we will use a bit of imagination as well as some of the known places where Jews migrated throughout these years to get us to its final destination – ANU in Tel Aviv! With the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, we enter into the Early Modern period where we see the flow of Jews settle in Poland, Lithuania and the Ottoman Empire. We also see the Jewish presence in India. The Paradesi Synagogue in Cochin, Indian was founded in 1568 by Jews expelled from Spain. It is still an active synagogue today that you can visit! It was the first synagogue built in the British Empire, despite the expulsion edict of 1290 from Britton, and was constructed about a century before Jews were allowed to return to England and resettle there. The synagogue is located in the quarter of Old Cochin known as Jew Town. The floor of the synagogue is composed of hundreds of Chinese, 18th-century, hand-painted porcelain tiles, each of which is unique. When you go to visit this amazing gem of a synagogue, you will be asked to leave your shoes outside, similar to the local customs for entering shrines, but the reason is the protection of this amazing tiled floor. These precious tiles were hand imported from China. There is also a hand-knotted oriental rug in the synagogue which was given as a gift from Haile Selassie, the last Ethiopian emperor, so we really have a lot of history in this small and amazing synagogue. We can also see here a beautiful example of a Torah scroll cover that attests to the story and character of the Cochin community. We see here the parchment of the Torah scroll encased in wood which is sheathed in ornate silver, which follows the tradition of Jews living in Muslim countires, while the crown and ornamanets are designed and applied in a southern Indian style. It is a beautiful melding of different styles and textures, making a mosaic of history come alive in an object. It also tells the story of how Jews have always melded and adopted from the culture around them. They never lived in a vacuum and always knew what was going on around them. Let’s explore this idea of being a part of the outside world while being separate a bit more. Lets move to another location at about the same time – Poland/Lithuania/modern day Ukraine to what was once part of the AstroHungarian kingdom. We know that our Megillah was made in an Ashkenazic community by someone with Spanish heritage. Although we do not know exactly where in the region it was made, we can assume some locations. It may have come from the area of Poland/Galatzia. Maybe from the small town named Chodorov, located about 50 kilometers from Lvov in the western Ukraine, not far from the Polish border. Built in 1652, the Chodorow synagogue was made entirely of wood, a plentiful and cheap building material in richly forested Eastern Europe. It was not just that it was a plentiful building material, the governments required that Jewish houses of worship be built only by wood for several reasons. Firstly, only churches were allowed to be built in lasting stone. And secondly, it was a message to the temporary state of Jews in their lands. If the government so decided, a wooden synagogue could be burned with no trace of its existence remaining, a stamen to the Jewish population that they were temporary and were not a permanent part of the community. Typically these synagogues soared above all other houses and buildings of the shtetl, defining the skyline by their presence: the very heart and soul of Jewish life in these communities. In Chodorow, like most eastern European shtetls, the population was poor, yet the modest surroundings of Jewish daily life were sharply and beautifully contrasted by the opulence of the synagogue, a true separation of the heavenly from the mundane. The synagogue was painted in 1714, by Israel Ben Mordechai Lissnicki, an itinerant Jewish artist who, unlike most synagogue artists, signed his work. The artist combined modern local culture with Jewish symbolism by showing the Zodiac signs each surrounded by passages from the bible and prayer. He also tells us other important stories from the times. In four prominent places on the ceiling, we see scenes depicting predators making off with a hapless animal victim while the rest of its kin stand helplessly by. Many of these hapless creatures are rabbits, which we see being held in the claws of the double headed eagle representing the King and Queen of Austro-Hungary, as well as being eaten by the griffon, representing the church. At this point and place in Jewish history, rabbits are thought to represent the Jewish people, a symbol that becomes clear in light of the history of the region. This ceiling was painted less than a half a century after the horrific Khmelnitsky Massacres of 1648–1649 had taken place where it is estimated that 100,000 Jews of the Ukraine were murdered, 1,800 synagogues destroyed, and hundreds of Jewish communities wiped out. Not all the local culture is depicted with doom and gloom. There are storks, which are called “Hassidim” and represent goodness and charity. Even today in Poland, storks are considered to represent goodness, and they are encouraged to build their nests next to human homes to enrich the lives of those who live there and bring them good luck. Our museum recreated this amazing ceiling using black and white photographs taken at the start of the 20th century by a doctoral student that photographed Jewish art. When the Nazis invaded the synagogue was often the first victim – desecrated, set aflame, and destroyed in front of the shocked Jewish population and, in some horrible cases, with members of the community forced inside of them. This was the fate of this synagogue. Perhaps another starting point for our Megillah was the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam. The beautiful Portuguese Synagogue, also called the Esnoga, is one of the most important legacies of the vibrant Jewish community in Amsterdam. During the 16th and 17th century, many Jews that faced persecution in Spain and Portugal fled to Amsterdam. The religious tolerance they enjoyed in the Dutch Republic was unheard of in the rest of Europe. The Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam were known as the "first modern Jews" because they were the first to distinguish between religious and secular spheres of their individual and collective lives. Their religious life was focused primarily on the synagogue, the religious calendar of Jewish life, and an eagerness to provide a Jewish education for their children. There is an inscription in Hebrew above the entrance that refers to Psalm 5:8: “In the abundance of Thy loving kindness will I come into Thy house" and mentions the date 1672. This synagogue is on the list of National Treasures of the Netherlands as the synagogue has been preserved as it was built. It is still lit by candles and has not had any modern conveniences added to the main building. The Jews of this community traveled far and wide from this starting point over the next century, establishing many new communities throughout the vast colonies of the Dutchin the West Indies, American and Africa. Perhaps it was during the time that our Megillah made its way to the Ottoman Empire as well. We know that our Megillah eventually ends up in Morocco before it makes aliyah to Israel. We can see from our beautiful Islamic Cultures gallery some of the textiles and designs that were seen in Muslim lands, including Moroco. The Megillah tells the story of Easther and her heroism, so let’s look at the femine side of our history as we look at the continued movement of our Megillah through history. Let’s take a look at this beautiful bridal gown known as “The Great Dress.” This Moroccan bridal gown expresses the deep connection that Jews who were expelled from Spain had to their material heritage. The gown, which is based on Renaissance-era Spanish design shows how the Jews remained committed to the customs and history even after many years of expulsions. Two of the gowns' embellishments are meant to protect the bride; the hamsa on the skirt and two birds by the vest collar. We can see in the silk velvet the colors of Spain and in the metal thread woven ribbons the health of Spain. These ties to Spain bring Morocco and our Megillah together. We know that the Megillah was in Morocco before it came to Israel. The Jewish community of Morocco is an ancient community. Before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, there were about 250,000 to 350,000 Jews in the country, which made them the largest Jewish community in the Muslim world. Today there are less than 2,000 Jews in the country. In June 1948, soon after Israel was established and in the midst of the first Arab-Israeli war, riots against Jews broke out killing 44 Jews. From 1948 onward most of the Jews left the country for Israel or other places in the world. The creation of the State of Israel caused a wave of Zionism to sweep across the Jews of the world. The Jews living in Muslim lands were always truned towards Jerusalem but now, in tandem with their Zionism, there was a wave of anti-Israel sentiment in the various Islamic countires and govenements that caused a wide sweeping exile of Jews from the countires they called home for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. Jews were no longer to stay in these countries. A beautiful example of this wave of Zionism can be seen in this flag from 1917 Russia; from the Poale Zion flag. We see depicted here the ideals of Zionism, the ideology that the Jewish proletariat from across the globe would come together to form a Marxist society, overturning capitalism in favor of communism for an equal society where all are taken care of. The goals for the new state of Israel were lofty, and Ben Gurion was one of the original leaders of the Poale Zion group. The flag=g we see before us says in Hebrew, on the left side Herzl's famous saying,“If you will it, it is no dream,” written above the saying “One land, One language, One people.” The left side of the flag is written in Yiddish and says: “The socialists radical party has joined for Zion. The politariate of all nations have been united.” There is a Russian slogan that criss crosses the banner to the same effect. The Holocaust and the subsequent movements of vast amounts of people looking for a home was the impidious for the creation of the State of Israel. Ben Gurion's vision we saw in the flag was transformed and made into the new flag representing the homecoming of a people after a 2,000 year sojourn in other countries, back to an independent Israel ruled by Jews. We can see here many of the documents of newcomers to the fledgling State of Israel. These documents represent the old identities that they used to bring them to the Land of Milk and Honey, to their new identities. The country allowed these newcomers to create a new homeland and culture, government and society. What would the papers of our Megillah look like? Would they have been issued by a Europen country, since we know that that is its roigio, or by a Muslim country, since we know that it ended up in Moroco? Was it's trip to Israel by land? Sea? Air? Who carried it here? What will its new identity be? What will it make of itself in this new/old land? What stories will it tell about where it came from? Our Megillah is carried to Israel by the Mimran family of Morocco to the Land of Israel. This treasure moves with the Mimram family to the city of Yavne, in central Israel, where it is unrolled and read every year, until the family starts to discover the history that they held in their hands. They decided that a priceless artifact which tells hundreds of years of their families history, can serve more than just their family. It was donated to ANU with the hopes that its amazing history will become part of the unique and ongoing history of the Jewish people and so that it can be used to enrich and teach others. I think that the goal has been met! A small artifact can tell amazing stories and we are so proud to be a part of the telling of these stories. I hope that you all enjoyed your historical journey with our beautiful Megillah. I hope that when you look at the artifacts that are part of your family histories, you will think of the stories that they tell, of the people who held them, and the journeys that they took. END WITH INFORMATION ON THE MY FAMILY STORY PROGRAM???? SEEMS TO BE A NATURAL TIE IN AT THIS POINT. | Timings: 01:23:27 Second Floor The Journey Film 01:24:00 Titus Arch from Beit Hatfutsot Picture of Josehpus Falvious from Lena Revenko wall 3D of Megilla from the Mimran Family. Orit explanation of the Megillah By Orit Cochin Synagogue, India Fez Synagogue from Hallelujah Torah Scroll, 2nd floor Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam Chodorov ceiling Ibn Dyan Synagogue, Morocco The great Dress |